Question

I am about to create an ASP.NET MVC app which will have over 2000 products and each products will approx 20 photos. The app will be asp.net mvc app and

I am using sql server 2008 r2 to manage my data. which way is the better approcah here;

• Uploading pictures to a path and
  storing their file names to database
  in order to be able to make a
  relation to each other.
• Storing pictures inside the database
  as byte as well and retreive them
  from there when needded.

Answer 1

definitely in the filesystem (store path) is better, i have done both in the past.

Against SQL server to store images
A) betting data in and out can be more difficult as have to used blob type objects and some ORMs don’t really cater for this
B) your data base is much bigger so effects your backup/restore policy. The more frequently you backup the better but space will be increased. Storing in file, yep you still need to backup but backing up filesystem is easy.
C) when you run out of storage space you just add another NAS drive / server and start storing images there, so scales horizontally

The common perception is not as good as data stored in two places but for me its better as the type of data in stored in the best storage medium for the data types ..