Question

I am currently working on an Paint-like WPF application and now stand before the problem how I enable my users to save the created images. Normally I would just save them to disk but in this application I have the requirement to later enable the user to create bigger “images” out of the already created ones. This would still be no problem with a normal filesystem approach but the user should also be able to search images by specific properties like categories/tags etc. and that would be difficult with a normal filesystem approach.

So I thought of some options I have for realizing what I want and now would like to know what you think of the approaches or if you even know a better one. The approaches are:

• Saving images in an internal database of the application (via SQLite or something similar)
• Saving images as normal files in the filesystem and keep an database in the application to reference these images (what happens if images were deleted by the user?)
• Saving images as normal files in the filesystem without extra database in the app (hard to filter them by category etc.)

Thanks!

Answer 1

Many programs (i.e. Aperture, Lightroom, Expression Media to name a few) store their images to disk and then maintain a metadata cache in a database. This seems like the most sensible approach for your application.