product pictures - multiple copes

yahyac

Here's an interesting question for you all.

My db is completely product based with thousands of products. Once a user drills down to the actual item (viewitem.php), the item's image that shows on the screen is simply matched by the actual item number. Okay, that's probably not clear.

Let's say a customer is ultimately trying to view item 1234. So they will end up going to the page viewitem.php?prodID=1234. The images on my side are named with their exact item numbers. So the code to pull that particular image is straightforward.

However, what if i have multiple images for one product. Perhaps i have 5 different views/angles. maybe on the server i have 1234.jpg, 1234side.jpg, 1234back.jpg, and so on.

How are most people coding this or putting these things in their database?

Are people actually making an attribute(s) in their product table for the name of the image(s)?

I'm just curious as to the most efficient way to solve the issue of wanting to show all possible pictures for a given product. Perhaps there's a way to search the server for files of the name 1234*.jpg?

Please advise.

Thanks.

Jonathan

mwasif

There are couple of ways to get this done.

Save the path/name of the image in the database against the attribute. e.g. If a product have multiple attributes you can make a product_image table and save the image path/name in them. product_image table will contain the following columns
id (auto_increment, this field is optional), product_id, image_path, image_type
1, 1234, images/products/, side
2, 1234, images/products/, back
You already save the images with product id name, you can simply display the image with a simple SELECT statement from database as
images/products/123side.jpg or
Or use the same products table and create a separate column for each attribute to save the image name/path.

In my opinion, first approach is good.

yahyac

Thanks for the answer.

Actually, here's my exact situation. I have an excel file containing product info for like 2000 items. I also have approximately 5000 pictures. The excel file does not mention what pictures go with which item numbers. But as mentioned previously, it is obvious based on the naming convention.

So for item 1234 in the excel file, there may be three or four different images. But again, the path/name of the images is NOT stores in the excel sheet (db).

Based on your answer, i'd have to go edit 2000 rows of the excel sheet to add the path/name of the image...which is too much to do.

I was hoping there's an easy way, using php, to search for files on the server, and let's say, there were four files starting with 1234***.jpg, then those four files would be the results and could be displayed. Is that possible?

Thanks.

mwasif

you can us is_file() or file_exsist() to know if there is a file exists on the system or not.

yahyac

i'm familiar with the ability to check whether a SPECIFIC file exists on the server.

But what if you don't know the exact name of the file and you want to check if any file starting with 1234 exists in a specific folder on the server.

Is that possible?

mwasif

Then you have to read all the directory contents and then go through all image names and find the specific pattern in the name. Getting filenames from a directory is a resource intensive and slow process. You server will face a hard time when there will be some concurrent requests to viewitem.php.

Piranha

Let's use your example with the id 1234 and see what happens in different scenarios. I assume that you check where the image name starts with the prodID from the URL.

Scenario 1: You input viewitem.php?prodID=1234 and get all the correct images for the product 1234. No problem here (yet).

Scenario 2: You input viewitem.php?prodID=123 and get all the correct images for the product 123. And you get all images for 1230, 1231, 1232, 1233 and so on. You will get images for 10 products that you didn't want.

Scenario 3: You input viewitem.php?prodID=12 or viewitem.php?prodID=1. You will now receive one hunderd / one thousand product images that you didn't want. A small problem.

Scenario 4: You input viewitem.php?prodID=1234 and get the correct images. But, as your product list grow, you will eventually get a product id 12340. And you have the same problem as in scenario 2 and 3.

Scenario 5: You use regexp to make sure that the character after the prodID is not a number. In other words, if you insert viewitem.php?prodID=12 you will not get products with the number 123, but you will get the image 12back.jpg. Then you get an image that have the name 1231stview.jpg, that belongs to product id 123, and you will get in trouble again.

Scenario 6: You take the time to do as mwasif suggests, and insert the images in a database. When you receive new images you can easily just add them into the database. The same with new products. Boring work, I know, but the problem is solved.

Scenario 7: You write a PHP script that goes through all the images and inserts them into the database automatically. This is a solution that will work pretty well, but it will probably take as long to write the script as it will to actually insert the images automatically. And you still have to check that everything was ok to avoid scenario 5.

Scenario 8: You call the customer / supplier and ask them to insert the image names in the excel file or a XML file. They probably have it in their database already, so it should not be that much work for them. Then you store the image names in the database while reading the file. This is the best solution, no question about it. If it is a supplier they should do it in order to get their products sold; if it is a customer they should do it to cut development costs.

Scenario 9: You use different folders for the different products, then you don't have to do the database work, just read all the files in the folder. Of course, if you want the images presented in some order you should use a database instead.

I won't recommend a single solution since I don't know any details. I just posted this to make you think about the different ways to solve it, and some drawbacks of some solutions.

Sxooter

What you have here is a classic one to many relationship. You need to map it that way.

create table myimages (ownerid int, imagename text);

then join to that table everytime you need an image.