I have an application with images stored in multiple categories, currently being stored by category ID in a column as a space separated list (eg. 1 5 23 2).
I have a query from a search filter, which is currently an array of IDs, (eg. 1 5).
Ideally, I’d find a solution using something like WHERE IN that would see if any of my array values exist in the stored column, although I don’t see an easy solution.
At the moment I have to query all the images, bring them into PHP and check there, using “array_intersect”. I see this as being a problem if I have 100,000s of images in the future to pull and then check.
Can anyone think of an elegant solution? The application is still in development, so I could arguably change the structure of my tables.
I think adding a map table would probably be best here which maps the image_id with the category_id.