Question

I’m building an app where each user can have multiple profiles. Users can upload multiple photos for each profile, etc.

The folder structure will be something like

public_html/
upload/
    user-123/
        profile-199/
        profile-321/
            images/
                123423.png

I’m going to have a one to many relationship between each profile and each photo, but I’m trying to see how I should flag a photo as special and the users “profile photo”.

My proposed table structure is something like this

id
profile_id
filename  (or maybe extension only, since filename will most likely just be the primary id for that photo)
profile (boolean field of whether this a profile pic or not)
date_added

How should I treat special images, like profile pictures?

Edit: Sorry if I wasnt clear. I want each user to be able to have multiple profiles, each profile to have many photos. Just like for Facebook, you can have many photos, but only one profile pic at any time.

Answer 1

That would work but it would have a problem that more than one photo could be marked as a profile photo unless you take special care to prevent this.

An alternative design is to have a table with columns user_id and special_photo_id where the photo_id is a foreign key into the photos table. This has a slightly different issue: now it is possible to have a special photo that doesn’t belong to the user.