Member Avatar for rotten69

Hey everyone,

I haven't recently done my research on this yet. I can recall from memory that I did some short research on storing images in a database and also had some questions answered in the forum about it. Additionally, I was told it is not a good practice to store them in a database because of their size. Now, I'm developing a web mobile app using jQuery for mobile and PHP and want to let users to store their profile image as a thumbnail.

Currently, I can't use the form element "file" to let them upload their profile image but I think there is a way around this which I will be looking into soon.

My questions are: 1- After figuring out the right form element that is used in mobile apps, do I store my user's profile image in the database as blob?

2- Is there a good framework that does the job for us pretty quickly?

I hope to hear from someone really soon.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by diafol
Member Avatar for diafol

File upload widgets should work on mobile. Why not?
It doesn't matter where you save them on the server - they're on the server. Blob data can be a bit much for general images. Thumbnails are usually quite small, so it may be OK.

Some people use base64 data uris. However their use is a bit debatable as they avoid the http calls BUT they aren't cached. Also not massively compatible with older browsers.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme )

I'm assuming that your uploading can be done by a bog-standard widget or you could look at options like PLUpload, Uploadify etc.

Blob fields are probably easier to maintain, as a user wanting to update an avatar would just overwrite the record. An user uploading a file to a permanent location has issues such as naming conventions / overwriting.

This site is just for mobile then? Can it be accessed from tablet/desktop? If so, what sort of experience will they receive?

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