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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-31T08:11:56+00:00

The common method to store images in a database is to convert the image

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The common method to store images in a database is to convert the image to base64 data before storing the data. This process will increase the size by 33%. Alternatively it is possible to directly store the image as a BLOB; for example:

$image = Imagick->new("image.jpg");
$data = $image->getImageBlob();
$data = $mysqli->real_escape_string($data);
$mysqli->query("INSERT INTO images (data) VALUES ('$data')");

and then display the image with

<img src="data:image/jpeg;base64,' .  base64_encode($data)  . '" />

With the latter method, we save 1/3 storage space. Why is it more common to store images as base64 in MySQL databases?

UPDATE: There are many debates about advantages and disadvantages of storing images in databases, and most people believe it is not a practical approach. Anyway, here I assume we store image in database, and discussing the best method to do so.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    • Pro base64: the encoded representation you handle is a pretty safe string. It contains neither control chars nor quotes. The latter point helps against SQL injection attempts. I wouldn’t expect any problem to just add the value to a “hand coded” SQL query string.

    • Pro BLOB: the database manager software knows what type of data it has to expect. It can optimize for that. If you’d store base64 in a TEXT field it might try to build some index or other data structure for it, which would be really nice and useful for “real” text data but pointless and a waste of time and space for image data. And it is the smaller, as in number of bytes, representation.

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