Related: this SO question.
In the above question the OP was asking about a project with a lot of binary data (i.e., images). I have a somewhat similar problem but of a smaller scale. I’m working on a project which is hosted on github. The project is an application with GUI, hence I have some images that will be used.
The amount of images is considerably small (probably not more than a hundred), and most of them are small PNGs. Since I work from different machines, it is important for me to be able to get a complete set of resources for building each time. Now I’m unsure what should I do with the images. This far, I can think of two options:
- Keep the images in the repo alongside with the code (they are unlikely to be changed, btw, but new ones might be added later)
- Keep the images elsewhere (e.g. on a cloud storage) and download them each time I need them.
I would be happy to go with the first one, thus my question is:
Will keeping binary data in the repo affect it in an unwanted manner (make it slower, or drastically increase it’s size or anything else)? Or, considering the amount of data I have, I shouldn’t worry about it?
We develop a moderately large web application and so we do have the usual images going around just as well. I have not seen any adverse effects whatsoever.
So, in my opinion, this is perfectly fine. I would much rather have everything I need for the build packed into one repo and versioned together.