Question

I want to create an image upload for users to upload a profile picture and be able to resize it. However, I was wondering how should I do the database table. I think I should have a field for user id, and image name, but then there would obviously be collisions which led me thinking about hash tables which seems like a overkill, so I thought I’ll ask here hoping someone who is more knowledgable could give me some ideas.

I am using Zend Framework, for your information.

Answer 1

This is may not be an exact answer for your question. However, it can be an advice.

If you want to keep the images or files in database, you have to maintain many things. There are a lot of discussion which you can search in google by “images in database or folders”

I would recommend you to keep the images in folders instead of in database. So, in your database you just have to keep only ‘path’ to images as a column.

In other words, your USERS table can have a column as:

profile_image_path varchar2(200)

instead of keeping the whole image as

 profile_image blob

The advantages for this solution are:

• you can let Apache handle images as statistic content (it could be considered as dynamic content if you keep in database).
• You do not have to headache how to render image in database, just render as a path and that’s it!.
• you can forget about maintain big data in database (just think about backup, import, export, and etc of 10,000 images in database)
• etc

The disadvantages for this solution are:

• You have to maintain backup separately from database. However this is not more work since you have to backup you php, files and etc anyways.

You can read more detail in google.