I'm using PHP and MySQL, and don't know where to start with how to set up profile pictures.
It seems all other user data can be held in the mysql table, but I don't think I can put pictures into a mysql table. So how do profile pictures generally work?
You can put pictures in a database (using a BLOB field), but I wouldn't, due to the performance hit.
Store the images on the filesystem with PHP, and just store the ID of the picture in the database.
I think that what is usually done is set up an upload system for users to upload their images. You just have to link this image with the user by naming it with something like a user ID.
Then you just have to store a link to the uploaded picture in your database, this way you could also imagine allowing user to use remote images although this might not be a good idea.
But as said, the MySQL BLOB field allows storing pictures.
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My sites profile system will have something like a Facebook profile, an image at the top and a profile image. My question is a simple one: Is it safer to upload the file directly to my server and store a link in the database or store a link to an offsite image in my database?
I think it depends on what you mean by 'safer'. If storage isn't an issue I'd upload to the server; your loading times will be faster and the image's existence will be guaranteed.
I was wondering a method to upload images in the posts of a blog. I am thinking of two ways:-
1) To create a row in the database for imageurl and use this url to point to the image stored on the local disk.
2) Is there a way to upload images directly to mysql???
You could use BLOB to store image directly in your database, But it makes your database heavy and usually all hosting services put a limit on database sizes.
I faced the same issue a while back and after some research i found out that The best way is to store it your file system and store its url in your database.
If you only have one folder, you don't need to store the whole URL just the file name and append the domain when displaying it.
Hope its help. :)
I have written a code, where the user selects a profile picture and then the picture is stored in localhost/user/$username/photos/photo1.gif.
After that, I assigned the filename (photo1.gif) into a session variable so I can display it from all my php scripts. This is working just fine. I can display the picture in every php script by accessing this session variable.
The only problem I have is when I am trying to login from the login page: In the login page I connect to the database, retrieve email and password, check them and if they are OK I redirect the user to home.php. The problem is that the user's photo is not linked to the email so i cannot know the filename of the photo. The only thing I know for sure is the directory (because I can retrieve username from database as well).
Lets say that a user has uploaded 4 photos (photo1, photo2, photo3, photo4 - photo4 was uploaded last). It makes sense that he is currently using photo4 as my profile picture.
Is there a way for me to access that folder and retrieve the filename of the picture uploaded last?
Also, as a general question, what is better, store the photos(or files) in a database or server?
A few options:
It would be 'better' to create a photo table and store the user_id and the photo location in that table. Storing the actual photo in the table as a blob is not generally recommended.
Alternatively, to avoid more tables, you could rename the photos as
username_photo1.jpg
username_photo2.jpg
username_photo3.jpg
And then you can retrieve the largest of them.
Finally, another option is to get the file creation date of the photos in the directory and take the most recent photo.
see Getting the filenames of all files in a folder
I am making an application in which every user has to sign in first and then he can access his home page. Now on the home page, I have given an option of uploading an image. Now if the user is uploading one image I am storing the full path of the uploaded image into a database and from there I can display the image easily by an img tag...
But what should I do when the user want to upload many images? Then how should I store their full paths in a database for the same user. Give me an idea just like Orkut or Facebook. Should I make a different table with named images and should I store images in different rows with the same username. What should I do?
I don't know the logic. What should I do? How can I upload many images and how can I store their path and what will be the wisest method and how do I display many images on one page (I can display one)?
You can make a folder, named after user name and id and put all their images there.
To display many images on one page, just add more <img> tags to the page.
This seems to be more of a design question than a PHP question. I would create a separate table to store all paths, this is more normalized.
You still need to handle the UI, but if you are doing a sort of gallery then that is fairly simple with some jQuery sideshows or something like that.
Yes, you want to use a separate table to store the image paths. You'll most likely want a record ID, the User ID, and the path to the image. You could also add a field to contain the sorting order for the images.
Having the sorting order field will allow you to page through the photos if there is more than one page of photos.
Your thinking is correct where you suggest creating a separate table with rows containing the image path and the username. The concept that you are dealing with is called cardinality. I'd recommend that you take a few minutes to read about this concept, since it is so important to database design.
In this case, you're talking about a one-to-many relationship between the user and the images.
Users of the website need to able to store images in their "area" , should I store these in the database directly or create a directory for each user.
Or should I just have a single directory for all images and in the database store a list of images that each user owns?
I'm looking for the most effecient way, which I think is a folder for each user?
If you have many pictures per user like avatar and gallery of photo created by the user then use separate folders named with the user id or a hash of the user id.
If you only store avatars have one big folder where the name of the image is the user id or hash of the user id.
It depends on how many pictures there are.
If there is only one picture per user, then perhaps all in the same directory.
However if you have albums and such, there can be millions of photos with all the users photos in the same folder. This would be very slow to search in. Then I'd go with one folder per user.
Also, never give direct access to the folders. Use your database to link to the files.
Better use folder or a cache folder. You can also use resizing functions for the image, so if user upload a large scale picture. Your script will manage to create different sizes, like avatar pics. And cache those images. So thumbnail or avatar viewers only viewing the cache image of the original image. And the large image is usable for future work, like a bigger preview of the avatar.