Picture Upload Storage Question

nyxx23

Heyas. I'm working on a website where I want people to be able to upload pictures to the website into their own accounts. I'm aware that this part of the site could take up alot of space in both the number of files and disk space.

What I wanted to know is where can I find out about the best way to store the images, where I can store them efficiently in my file system. Thanks.

rbblue8

My setup is that I have the file uploaded to the temp directory (php default with most web hosts) then use move_uploaded_file() (php command) to move the file to the correct directory under my domains folder. In this case it was pictures. Then just put the link to it in the mysql table. I would not recomand storing th epicture in your mysql table, and I would recomand that you limit the size of the picture they upload.

here is my code

$picture=$_FILES['file']; //where ['file'] is the name of the form field
	$file_name=$picture['name'];
	$file_size=$picture['size'];
	if($file_size >500150)
		{
		die('<center><span style="color:FFFFFF">Your file is too large for this site. Please hit back and try again. Your image must be under 500kb!');
		}
	$file_tmp=$picture['tmp_name'];
	$new_des='/homepages/13/d153872232/htdocs/knightsofrage.net/roster/pictures/'.$file_name.'';
	$mysql_des='http://knightsofrage.net/roster/pictures/'.$file_name.'';
    if($file_tmp == "")$mysql_des=$picture1;
	$move=move_uploaded_file($file_tmp,$new_des);
	$update_string=("UPDATE users SET picture_file='$mysql_des', about_me='$text' where username='$user'");
	$update=mysql_query($update_string, $db);

nyxx23

rbblue8 wrote:
My setup is that I have the file uploaded to the temp directory (php default with most web hosts) then use move_uploaded_file() (php command) to move the file to the correct directory under my domains folder. In this case it was pictures. Then just put the link to it in the mysql table. I would not recomand storing th epicture in your mysql table, and I would recomand that you limit the size of the picture they upload.

I have code I've previously written for other projects, so uploading isn't a problem. But when I have theoretically 200 users with 5 pictures each, I can't just put all 1000 pictures into one folder. It would slow down the time to access that part of the directory structure because the one folder is overloaded.

rbblue8

hmm

i guess i need to understand how this whole thing works.....

when i display the picture that they have uploaded it's by a direct link to the picture ex(http://my-domain.com/picture/file-name.jpg) So i never call the entire directory.

so how are these pictures being displayed?

if you want to...

use

function countfiles($path, $filter)
{

$dir = opendir($path);

while ($file = readdir($dir)){

 if(strstr($file, $filter)){ $i++; }
}//end while

closedir($dir);

return $i;

}

to count your files.. and then use an if statment ot check that the file count is under a set value.. and if it is.. make a script to move the foles to a different folder.

nyxx23

I guess the best analogy for this part of the site would be imageshack or flickr, where they store large quantities of images. The link the user sees is a direct link, but the way they are stored on the server is an algorythm to evenly store the images.

rbblue8

nyxx23 wrote:
I guess the best analogy for this part of the site would be imageshack or flickr, where they store large quantities of images. The link the user sees is a direct link, but the way they are stored on the server is an algorythm to evenly store the images.

whats your algorythm look like? and why can you not use that to decide when to switch folders.

basically lay it out. how do you want it to be stored and lets go from there. 🙂