Question

I am implementing an image upload system in PHP, The following are required:

• Have categories
• Allow users to comment on images
• Allow rating of images

For that, I have 2 approaches in mind:

1. Implement the categorization by folders

Each category will have its own folder, and PHP will detect categories via those folders.

Pros

• Structured look, easily locatable images.
• Use of native PHP functions to manipulate and collect information about folders and files

Cons

• Multiple categorization is a pain
• Need to save the full path in the database

2. Implement the categorization by database

Each image in the database will have a catID (or multiple catIDs), and PHP will query the database to get the images

Pros

• Easily implemented multi-categories
• Only image name is saved

Cons

• Seems more messy
• Need to query the database a lot.

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Which do you think is better? Or is there a third, completely different, approach that I’m missing?

Just a note, I don’t need code, I can implement that myself, I’m looking to find what to implement.

Would love to hear from you.

Answer 1

I eventually went with the best answer of this question: Effeciently storing user uploaded images on the file system.

It works like a charm. Thanks for all of the answers!