Best way to store uploaded images?

mybikeisace

Trying to decide on the best way to store some uploaded images.
They will be images of a car, and each car will have at most 5 images.

1) Store the images with names such as 1_1.jpg, 1_2.jpg ... and then when I come to display the images scan through the folder to find images of this name and store them in a array.

2) create a new folder for this car and store the images in their with the names 1.jpg, 2.jpg . . then recurse through these and load into array to display.

2) Store refrences to each image in the db along with the other info for the car. However if i only had 3 images this means their would be 2 null refrences in the db.

What do you reckon is the most efficient?

devinemke

i suggest option #1 but more specicifcally use the primary key field from your database table as the first part of the filename to relate the images to specific records.

mybikeisace

Yeah, thats what I have done in previous projects, but then I was thinking it might be more efficient to store the path names to the images in a db.

Weedpacket

It depends on how many cars you're talking about. Thousands or merely hundreds? And are all five images of all cars being displayed all together, or do you have, say, a page with one representative photo of each car and another page with all photos of just one car?
(And while we're on the subject, you might also want to ponder the consequences of having five subdirectories, with each car's photos being distributed among them one per subdirectory.)

Roger_Ramjet

Standard pactice is to have a cars table with one row per car, and a second table with the images records linked to the car by the car's primary key. Store all the images in 1 directory for all cars and use the cars PK as the first part of the file name - that way they will self-sort which in the long run you will find convenient. All you then have to do is to extract the file names for a given car id and concat that to the path for your html output, your webserver will dish the file out from there. Absolutely no reason or need to parse directory lists.

Weedpacket

Unless (like I was wondering) if there were thousands of cars - some filesystems dislike having to deal with several thousand files in a single directory.

mybikeisace

for this project I would be talking hundreds of cars, not thousands.
Should be fine to store all the images in one folder, rather than seperate directories.