I am working on a task to enable image uploading and auto-scaling(from full sized to thumbnail) by jQuery & PHP.
I can naturally come up with two approaches :
First, store both images as binary objects directly into MySQL;
Second, store only urls to the images and keep the images somewhere on server.
The images are for everyone to view, so there are no security restrictions, as far as I know.
Personally I don’t have any preference, however, at the end of the day, it is the business people that are going to manage the images as part of the system(CRUD). So I am wondering
which seems to be a bit better for them?
Of course I am building a easy-to-use, visualize web interface for the staff to control the process, but I am not sure if that is enough. Lessons told me that if I don’t think for the future and seek the most flexible approach, the I will probably screw myself sooner or later.
PS. The following link is what I’ve found so far, which is pretty cool, no flash involved 🙂
Andrew Valum’s ajax image upload jQuery plugin
Oh, how managers do like the “I know this too, I wanna play with it” thingies.
Store the images on a server. This way they can view/put/copy/modify the images the way they are used to: using Windows Explorer. They already know how to do it, and you won’t have to write a lot of custom code afterwards to “I want to be able to X images …”.