I am going to be approaching a large site in the near future that will require hundreds, maybe thousands of videos to be uploaded and stored. In addition, many images will need to be uploaded but not nearly as much, and they will be small in size. Up until now, I've always used php and mysql as follows:
upload an image
store the file name in the database
reference a folder + filename in the database to display file
However, I've done some research on some BLOB storing images and files in the database and unsure of which way is best for this potentially large-scale project. Should I continue uploading the way I've been, or is it more efficient to use the BLOB type in mysql? I'm afraid that by storing lots of videos and images in a database, it could get to be too much data or too slow, but I could be completely wrong. Please let me know any and all suggestions you have.
Storing images in BOLB is not efficient. It will be difficult to manage. Your database will become large.
It will be slower then serving a file from the server with a PHP script
Ok, so the two big areas are: backup, and change
Backup
Depending on the DB engine you choose, backups require locking / dumping / unlocking. The bigger the database the longer the lock will be there. You could use some features (master/slave) to allow hotsyncing (backups without the locks) but there's a risk the backup won't completely cover the dataset, and the scale of the DB is still a factor. If large files are simply files (rather than DB BLOBS), it's just a matter of making a backup strategy for the file system, and since they're probably static this just means having multiple copies stored (this could even be by design at upload - store on server A and server B).
Change
Do you expect your system to stay the same? It sounds like you will have scaling issues. Might you move the DB to another server, the file storage to another server or SAN (or S3 etc) as your system grows? If you've got it all locked in the DB you have to rely on DB only solutions to deal with the swelling size (large expensive servers, master/slaves etc). Of course you could store the files in one DB (less backup requirements, doesn't mess around with your data DB) and other data in another... but a filesystem is a DB of sorts.
So
So for backups and scaling storing large files as files and not BLOBs is a better solution. If the files were small (low MP JPGs for example) the balance may shift. But for large files there's no point in the overhead of DB processing, and the extra load requirements it puts on the DB server. Keep 'em separate.
I have at my disposal PHP, MySQL and a Linux server.
The site I'm creating for a client should have a back-end manageable photo gallery.
I am planning to create it fully in MySQL, meaning I would have a table containing a mediumblob that would contain the binary data of the picture. This would allow me to have everything at one spot, not having to rely on the chance that the client wouldn't accidentally remove an image from the gallery directory without updating the database and so forth.
The alternative, of course, would be to have the images independent of the MySQL database, and only save the image paths.
What I'm posting a question here for is to ask you experts if there are any potholes in this method I'm not seeing. I have never tried this method of creating a gallery before. For instance, is it considered bad practice retrieving large amounts of data from MySQL when file-system storage is possible?
What are your thoughts?
(I will mark correct the reply that erases all doubt about this case from my mind)
Personally, I wouldn't recommend you reinvent that wheel... especially if you want your clients/users to be updating this data. Far better to look to an already existing solution. There are tons of them out there. Probably the most robust is Gallery
As for your actual question, there are lots of reasons not to store binary files in the db. (And only a few that I know about to do so.) Size is a definite consideration. Many hosting providers have a much smaller size limit to your database than filesystem limit. You would be tying them to providers that allow enormous database filesizes. Additionally, apache is VERY good at serving static files to the client. PHP passing those binary files through is going to be WAY slower. Your site's speed would definitely suffer.
I would not store images in the database since you probably want to enable client and/or server side caching for those images. Storing images in the DB will not do any good for this. Store the path of the image in the database and not the file itself.
I wouldn't store images in the database, grows you database way too big. I would make references to the images on the file system. Database reserved for meta data on the images in question.
Also curious why you don't just opt for an open source image gallery to start with like ZenPhoto? And build on that for the customer?
I am planning to start a site in which the content is generated by the users. What is the best method to save the data submitted by user?
Is the method of saving the data in phpmyadmin database a good idea considering that the data submitted by users is large similar to a blog post. Btw I'm good in working with php and mysql but I'm not sure whether it is a good method.
By 'phpmyadmin' database I assume you just mean a MySQL database.
Since your user data is basically a 'blog post' - basic text and HTML, and you'll most likely be storing username, posting dates, titles, and the like as well -- a MySQL database is a fine place to store it.
If you're using standard shared hosting, your options are pretty much a relational database (MySQL) or a flat file. Between those two choices, a relational database is the better option.
Not sure just what you're asking here - If you're thinking of actually trying to save a .jpg file and text as blobs physically stored in the database, don't. Not if you intend to have a lot of users all uploading stuff. Look into saving it on your server in a folder for the user or better yet to the cloud - it'll be cheaper in the long run and save you tons of anguish with a corrupt database.
I was wondering what is the best way to store a users upload images like an avatar and so on using PHP and MySQL? Where should I begin? And is there a good article on this?
"Best" depends on what your goal is.
The two primary ways of storing user-uploaded images are either putting the binary content into the database as a BLOB, or storing the images to the drive somewhere and putting an entry into the database indicating which image belongs where.
Placing the images in the database has the advantage of not requiring any sort of filesystem permissions on the webserver, and removes any sort of syncing issues if you're serving up the site off of multiple webservers. However, over time it makes your database huge, and if you don't design your tables correctly, it can absolutely kill your performance and scalability.
Storing the images as file on the file system has the added advantage of making retrieval extremely quick and efficient, since webservers are very good at serving static files.
Edited to add
If you decide to store file content in the database, absolutely do not put it in a table that needs to be accessed quickly. If, for example, you have a "users" table that is searched on nearly every pageview, then that table is not the place to put your file contents. Instead, create a separate "images" or "files" table containing the file and related meta-information.
Putting a lot of bytes per row into a table makes that table very slow to work with. You don't want that kind of thing in tables that see heavy use.
Images should really be stored on the file system for a couple of reasons:
Proxying and If-Modified-Since web requests: Apache can process If-Modified-Since HTTP headers for you and return a 304 response, and that's about the best performance you can get. Reverse Squid proxies and proxies posted at ISPs will attempt to take advantage of this.
Virus scanning: if you allow any file uploads, jerks will try and upload scary stuff to see if they can bust your site. It's not unreasonable to want to run ClamAV or the like against your user uploads to see if there's trouble afoot. You wouldn't want to tie up your database if you wanted to scan the records for malware.
Schema simplicity: If you allow file uploads, you'll also need to add meta data about the MIME-type, file size, height and width. If the file itself doesn't match the MIME-type in the table, then you need to code a select from the table and stream it into /usr/bin/file. It can be much simpler to shell_exec( "/usr/bin/file /path/to/mumble" ).
Thumb-nailing: user image uploads are likely to need to be thumb-nailed, and this is often much easier done asynchronous to the actual web request. It's really not fun when some well meaning user attempts to upload a 150MB photoshop file given to them by their professional photographer buddy, and your apache instance goes OOM when attempting to load the ImageMagick library in the memory space of the web worker. This really doesn't scale for apache workers. Create a work queue/cron job outside of Apache to handle this work.
Table corruption: Wow, you don't really want to cripple all user avatars if your MySQL index file gets borked and you need to do an offline table repair on that table.
Backup and restore: You don't really want to lock a large table with mysqldump. Using rsync will save you a lot of time and give you much more flexibility. Tables are typically restored a whole table a time--tables are not typically backed up in smaller pieces.
make a new directory on your server for each user with the user id being the name of the directory and save the user's images inside it. whenever you want to display the user's image:
<img src="<path>/users_images/<user_id>/thumb.gif" />
If I were you, I would just save the image somewhere in your sites directory and then save the link to the image in MySQL, if you really want to save it in a database, I would read it into a string and then base64_encode() it and then save it in the database.
There are all sorts of little troubles you will face by storing them in a database, you will have to create scripts to echo them back out ect, and the server and database load will be greatly increased. If I were you, I'd just store the reference.
I suggest having a table where you store user data like username, first name. In that table create a field called something like "avatar" in which you can store a file reference.
Assuming your user avatars are stored in: htdocs/images/avatars/
And user apikot has the avatar "avatar.jpg" stored agains it's user in the database, you could then compile the following url when generating an image tag: "/htdocs/images/avatars/avatar.jpg".
Here's an example of storing the image in binary on a MySQL database. I'm not too sure if there are any advantages or not to that. I'll leave it for someone else to comment.
Another way you could do it is store the location of the image in a column and query it for referencing.
Create a BLOB type field, and insert the result of file_get_contents( $ImageFile )
I have built a small web application in PHP where users must first log in. Once they have logged in, I intend on showing a small thumbnail as part of their "profile".
I will have to ensure the image is below a particular size to conserve space, or ensure it is a particular resolution, or both, or even perhaps use something like image magick to scale it down.
Not sure what the best approach for that is yet, any ideas welcome.
Also, I have been trying to work out if it is better to store the image in the users table of MySQL as a blob, or maybe a separate images table with a unique id, and just store the appropriate image id in the users table, or simply save the uploaded file on the server (via an upload page as well) and save the file as theUsersUniqueUsername.jpg.
Best option?
I found a tutorial on saving images to mysql here:
http://www.phpriot.com/articles/images-in-mysql
I am only a hobby programmer, and haven't ever done anything like this before, so examples, and/or a lot of detail is greatly appreciated.
Always depends of context, but usually, I store a user image on the filesystem in a folder called /content/user/{user_id}.jpg and try to bother the database as little as possible.
I would recommend storing the image as a file and then have the file URI in the database. If you store all the images in the database, you might have some problems with scaling at a later date.
Check out this answer too:
Microsoft's advice for SQL Server used to be, for speed and size, store images in the file system, with links in the database. I think they've softened their preference a bit, but I still consider it a better idea certainly for size, since it will take up no space in the database.
The overhead using BLOB is a lot less than most people would have you believe, especially if you set it up right. If you use a separate server just running the DB to store binary files then you can in fact use no file-system at all and avoid any overhead from the file-system
That said the easiest/best way unless you have a couple of servers to yourself is storing them in the filesystem
Do not store the absolute URL of the file in your DB, just the unique part (and possibly a folder or two), e.g. 2009/uniqueImageName.jpg or just uniqueImageName.jpg.
Then in your pages just add the host and other folders onto the front, that way you have some flexibility in moving your images - all you'll need to change is a line or two in your PHP/ASP.NET page.
There is no need to store outside the document root for security - a .htaccess file with DENY FROM ALL will work the same and provide more flexibility
No need to 'shunt' images so much for security, just have a getImage.php page or something, and then instead of inserting the actual URL in the src of the image, use something like getImage.php?file=uniqueImageName.jpg.
Then the getImage.php file can check if the user is authorised and grab the image (or not).
Use a name which is guaranteed to be unique (preferably an integer i.e. primary key) when storing, some file-system (i.e. Windows) are case-insensitive, so JoeBloggs.jpg and joebloggs.jpg are unique for the database, but not for the file-system so one will overwrite another.
Use a separate table for the images, and store the primary key of the image in the users table. If you ever want to add more fields or make changes in future it will be easier - it's also good practice.
If you are worried about SEO and things like that, store the image's original file name in another field when you are uploading, you can then use this in your output (such as in the alt tag).
Challenging the Conventional Wisdom!
Of course it is context dependent, but I have a very large application with thousands of images and documents stored as BLOBS in a MySQL database (average size=2MB) and the application runs fine on a server with 256MB of memory. The secret is correct database structure. Always keep two separate tables, one of which stores the basic information about the file, and the other table should just contain the blob plus a primary key for accessing it. All basic queries will be run against the details table, and the other table is only access when the file is actually needed, and it is accessed using an indexed key so performance is extremely good.
The advantages of storing files in the database are multiple:
Much easier backup systems are required, as you do not need to back up the file system
Controlling file security is much easier as you can validate before releasing the binary (yes, you can store the file in a non-public directory and have a script read and regurgitate the file, but performance will not be noticeably faster.
(Similar to #1) It cleanly separates "user content" and "system content", making migrations and cloning easier.
Easier to manage files, track/store version changes, etc, as you need fewer script modifications to add version controls in.
If performance is a big issue and security and backups aren't (or if you have a good fs backup system) then you can store it the the FS, but even then I often store files (in the case of images) in the DB and building a caching script that writes the image to a cache folder after the first time it's used (yes, this uses more HD space, but that is almost never a limiting factor).
Anyway, obviously FS works well in many instances, but I personally find DB management much easier and more flexible, and if written well the performance penalties are extremely small.
We created a shop that stored images in the DB. It worked great during development but once we tested it on the production servers the page load time was far too high, and it added unneccessary load to the DB servers.
While it seems attractive to store binary files in the DB, fetching and manipulating them adds extra complexity that can be avoided by just keeping files on the file system and storing paths / metadata in the DB.
This is one of those eternal debates, with excellent arguments on both sides, but for my money I would keep images away from the DB.
I recently saw this tip's list: http://www.ajaxline.com/32-tips-to-speed-up-your-mysql-queries
Tip 17:
For your web application, images and other binary assets should normally be stored as files. That is, store only a reference to the file rather than the file itself in the database.
So just save the file path to the image :)
I have implemented both solutions (file system and database-persisted images) in previous projects. In my opinion, you should store images in your database. Here's why:
File system storage is more complicated when your app servers are clustered. You have to have shared storage. Even if your current environment is not clustered, this makes it more difficult to scale up when you need to.
You should be using a CDN for your static content anyways, and set your app up as the origin. This means that your app will only be hit once for a given image, then it will be cached on the CDN. CloudFront is dirt cheap and simple to set up...there's no reason not to use it. Save your bandwidth for your dynamic content.
It's much quicker (and thus cheaper) to develop database persisted images
You get referential integrity with database persisted images. If you're storing images on the file system, you will inevitably have orphan files with no matching database records, or you'll have database records with broken file links. This WILL happen...it's just a matter of time. You'll have to write something to clean these up.
Anyways, my two cents.
What's the blob datatype for anyway, if not for storing files?
If your application involves authorisation prior to accessing the files, the changes are that you're a) storing the files outside of DOCUMENT_ROOT (so they can't be accessed directly; and possibly b) sending the entire contents of the files through the application (of course, maybe you're doing some sort of temporarilly-move-to-hashed-but-publicly-accessible-filename thing). So the memory overhead is there anyway, and you might as well be retrieving the data from the database.
If you must store files in a filesystem, do as Andreas suggested above, and name them using something you already know (i.e. the primary key of the relevant table).
I think that most database engines are so advanced already that storing BLOB's of data does not produce any disadvantages (bloated db etc). One advantage is that you don't have any broken links when the image is in the database already. That being said, I have myself always done so that I store the file on disk and give the URI to the database. It depends on the usage. It may be easier to handle img-in-db if the page is very dynamic and changes often - no namespace -problems. I have to say that it ends down to what you prefer.
I would suggest you do not store the image in your db. Instead since every user will be having a unique id associated with his/her profile in the db, use that id to store the image physically on the server.
e.g. if a user has id 23, you can store an image in www.yourname.com/users/profile_images/23.jpg. Then to display, you can check if the image exists, and display it accordingly else display your generic icon.
As the others suggested:
Store the images in the filesystem
Do not bother to store the filename, just use the user id (or anything else that "you already know")
Put static data on a different server (even if you just use "static.yourdomain.com" as an alias to your normal server)
Why ?
The bigger your database gets the slower it will get.
Storing your image in the database will increase your database size.
Storing the filename will increase your database size.
Putting static data on a different server (alias):
Makes scaling up a lot easier
Most browsers will not send more than two requests to the same server, by putting static data on a "second" server you speed up the loading
After researching for days, I made a system storing images and binaries on the database.
It was just great. I have now 100% control over the files, like access control, image sizing (I don't scale the images dynamically, of course), statistics, backup and maintenance.
In my speed tests, the sistem is now 10x slower. However, it's still not in production and I will implement system cache and other optimizations.
Check this real example, still in development, on a SHARED host, using a MVC:
http://www.gt8.com.br/salaodocalcado/calcados/meia-pata/
In this example, if a user is logged, he can see different images. All products images and others binaries are in DB, not cached, not in FS.
I have made some tests in a dedicated server and results were so far beyond the expectations.
So, in my personal opinion, although it needs a major effort to achieve it, storing images in DB is worth and the benefits are worth much more the cons.
As everybody else told you, never store images in a database.
A filesystem is used to store files -> images are files -> store them in filesystem :-)
Just tested my img's as blob, so. This solution working slower than images on server as file. Loading time should be same with images from DB or http but is't. Why? Im sure, when images are files on server, browser can caching it and loading only once, first time. When image going form DB, every time is loaded again. That's my oppinion. Maybe Im wrong about browser caching, but working slower (blob). Sry my English, whatever ;P
These are the pros of both solutions
In BLOBS :
1) pros : the easiness to mange clusters since you do not have to handle tricky points like file syncs between servers
2) DB backups will be exhaustive also
In files
1) Native caching handly (and that's the missing point of previous comments, with refresh and headers that you won't have to redesign in DB (DB are not handling last modification time by default)
2) Easiness of resizing later on
3) Easiness of moderation (just go through your folders to check if everything is correct)
For all these reasons and since the two pros of databases are easier to replicate on file system I strongly recommend files !
In my case, i store files in file system. In my images folder i create new folder for each item named based on item id (row from db). And name images in an order starting from 0. So if i have a table named Items like this:
Items
|-----|------|-----|
| ID | Name | Date|
|-----|------|-----|
| 29 | Test1| 2014|
|-----|------|-----|
| 30 | Test2| 2015|
|-----|------|-----|
| 31 | Test3| 2016|
|-----|------|-----|
my images directory looks like something like:
images/
29/
30/
31/
images/29/0.png
images/29/1.jpeg
images/29/2.gif
etc.