Images in a database?

What are the ups and downs of having images stored in a database? My site gets new pictures every once in a while from users if I were to store these in folders I would have extensive folders if I wanted them organized. If they were in a database I could find them easy and there are no need for all those folders. But would this slow me down? Having a huge database would make the querys go slower correct?

Having a huge database doesn't really affect the speed at which you could get the results. Also, you would only store image paths and you would still need the folders, however you wouldn't need to search through all them.

To sum it up quickly, yes storing images in the database (ie. storing BLOB data, not just paths to files) would slow things down considerably.

With a correctly (or, not badly) structured database there shouldn't be much impact on the normal queries that you already make but there are bigger concerns. For every time someone tries to access the image, you'll need to load up a script (ruby, php, python, whatever) to interpret the request, connect to the database, find the image, bring back the image data and output it. This will take much more time, and considerably more processing power, than simply letting the web server find the file stored in the file system normally.

The only time I've gone for the route of storing the image/file data in a database is when I needed fine grained control of who exactly gained access to the file where the overhead of loading up a script file and database connection was done anyway for the access control.

With an organised folder/file structure, I'd certainly recommend storing them in the file system rather than in a database.

I was thinking so I guess ill just stick with putting paths in the database. Thank you for the help!

Acutally in .net LINQ you can do something called delay loading. It's actually hard for me to explain it so heres a quote from other site:

For a simple example of when I’d want to-do this, consider the “Category” entity class we modeled above. The categories table inside “Northwind” has a “Picture” column which stores a (potentially large) binary image of each category, and I only want to retrieve the binary image from the database when I’m actually using it (and not when doing a simply query just to list the category names in a list).

So as you can see, while the query is there, its not actually fetching the info until its acutally needed.

If your well advanced in PHP, you can somewhat try to create this but i have never seen it happen.

on the other hand, if you have < 1000 users/pics then give or take the site usage you should be okay.

For a recent project I've had a dilemma... what to do to make image caching work (to avoid gdlibrary processing all the time) and had choices:
1. throw images in db
2. throw only image paths to db
... and chosed none, because with a hundred or so images being cached each minute it would slow the db searching considerably.

What I did is created a unique name based on unique params each picture had, md5()-ed those filenames, and could easily reconstruct names with params that are already loaded. That means - no calls to DB were made, and no calls for writing to db also.

The bottom line is: if you know the exact path to the image, it will display a lot faster then calling it from db in any way.