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I searched for this but only found ways to save the image as a blob to the database. What I would like to do is to save the image location in the database and then retrieve the file automatically from the location instead of saving it as a blob into the database. Does this make any sense at all? Or is it better and faster and cheaper to just save the image files into the database as a blob? Depending on the locale i might have to get a different picture.

Thanks for your help!

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I have experience with both (saving an image as a blob in a RDBMS) and only storing the link to it in a filesystem/url manner. What I have come to realize is the first approach is plain no scalable.

Here is a rather biased list of things about each approach.

Approach 1. Saving images as blobs:

Cons:

  1. When the number of images increase, so does your database size and you are limited to the filesystem your RDBMS engine runs on.

  2. When you want to retrieve a large number of these blobs, and if they are big in size, you waste IO/bandwdith and put a strain on your RDBMS engine. You ideally want it to have short queries that execute fast and move a little amount of bytes around. You just can't get that if you save the data as a BLOB in your relational database. While some might argue that for repeatable queries caching will help, I will argue that I if those huge chunks of data weren't there in the first place, I wouldn't have to put them in cache.

  3. There is no reliable way for a db admin/ content manager to easily retrieve the contents a blob that is in db, for example, to verify if an image is broken. He would have to connect to the db and extract the BLOB bytes in some format and then view it. Or alternatively you can build some page to do that for him but that would be a badly put together gimmicks in my honest opinion.

Pros:

  1. You don't have to rely on file systems being available or external systems on which you host your images to be available. You would probably write a bit less code and you will have more control over your code since all the stuff you want is in your RDBMS.

Approach 2. Saving images as a link to a filesystem/urls

Pros:

  1. Greatly alleviates performance strain on your RDBMS engine.

  2. If you store the images as links, a system admin/ content manager can easily check them by just copying the link in a browser and verifying it renders properly.

  3. If you don't use an external image hosting service but rather an internal, you still retain a great amount of control while having the possibility in future to add more image hosting servers/ filesystems.

  4. If you have a large amount of pictures being retrieved and they are not hosted by you, you can distribute a lot of network load thus making load times snappier.

Cons:

  1. Things will be a bit decentralized adding some complexity to your application. If you are using an external hosting service, it might be down and you can have no control over it.

In conclusion, I wholeheartedly recommend using the second approach.

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In general I agree with @baba's answer.

However it really depends on the number of and sizes of the images. If all the images are small thumbnails then I would store them in the database, so that everything is in one place.

It's also possible to do both...as long as the storage space is available for both the database and filesystem. This gives you the best of both worlds and a built-in backup.

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