Question

I am trying to create an application like Facebook in which each user can create multiple albums and then place photos inside it. Users can also comment on the photos, so I need to make a database where album_name, pic_name, then comments on the pic will be applied.

I have a concept but I don’t know whether it is feasible or not.

Here is my user table schema:

candidate_register_table

|----------------------------------------------------|
|   username  |  name   |  age   | sex   | password  |
|----------------------------------------------------|

A record would look like this:

|---------------------------------------------------------|
|   saz26  |  Saswat Routroy   |  26   | Male   | Saswat  |
|---------------------------------------------------------|

Now I want to create a table holding the album_names for each user creating albums.

Say the table name is saz26_albums, where saz26 is the username in the candidate_register_table, (I am concatenating the username with the string "_albumname" to create a table) the schema of this table will be like this:

|------------------------------|
| album_name  |  cover_pic     |
|------------------------------|

A tuple in the above table will look like this:

|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Candidate_Pics/Male/saz26/MyPics  |Candidate_Pics/Male/saz26/MyPics/2.jpg|
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|

That means, for each username, a new table username_albums will be created holding the path of each albums(folder) he creates:

Another table with the name saz26_pics will be created with the following schema:

|------------------------------------------|
| pic_name  |  album_name      | caption   |
|------------------------------------------|

For example like this:

|------------------------------------------|-----------------------------------|----------|
| Candidate_Pics/Male/saz26/MyPics/1.jpeg  |  Candidate_Pics/Male/saz26/MyPics | At Sea   |
|------------------------------------------|-----------------------------------|----------|

Now, the last part, which definitely needs a table for each picture, I mean that a table denoting a single pic, and it contains all the usernames, and their corresponding comments given by them.

Say for example, a table with name:

saz26_MyPics/1_comments

|----------------------------|
| username  |  comments      |
|----------------------------|

For example like this:

|----------------------------------|
| suhani18  |  Where is this place |
|----------------------------------|
| saz26     |      Dead Sea        |
|----------------------------------|

I don’t know whether any other possible design can be achieved, I just want someone to let me know any other possibilities. If any other possibilities not present, then is my design feasible enough?

Some people told me to maintain a schema somewhat like this by creating a table albums:

|-----------------------------------------|
| username  |  album_name | cover_pic     |
|-----------------------------------------|

This doesn’t solve my problem which is how to maintain comments on each picture. Because some pictures can have 200 comments, some 3 comments and some will have no comments at all.

Answer 1

You only need four tables: users, albums, pics and comments. Each table should have an id column of type int, with auto_increment, and set as the primary key for the table.

Then on table albums you have a user_id column for the album owner. On pics, you have an album_id, and on comments you have both pic_id and user_id (all int columns, preferably indexed).

With such a structure, you can easily retrieve you data using SQL JOINS.

UPDATE

Since username is already a PK on the users table, you can use that instead of user_id in albums and comments.

About the comments table: it seems to me that it only needs 3 columns: username (the user who made the comment), pic_id (the id of the picture the comment refers to), and comment (the comment itself).