Related
Well we all know how many arguments and lives have been lost with the discussion of using databases for file storage (images specifically). I'm in a bit of a pickle when it comes to deciding on how to proceed with my project.
I have a website that allows admins to upload employee pictures. For now, these pictures are stored in BLOB in my MySQL database. Also, I have a windows application that runs alongside the website. This application enables employees to punch in and have their pictures appear when they've successfully done so. The picture is retrieved via a mysql query within the application (from a non-local remote location) that converts the image content to a readable image that's being outputted in a picture box, confirming the identity of the employee.
In my eyes, it is much much easier to have the images stored in the database and have them retrieved via a simple query. I found this a lot easier than storing image paths in the database and having to deal with the application downloading the images. I also don't have to deal with collisions, folder organization and security and paths being re-written for x,y reasons, etc etc.
The images stored in the DB are a mere 20 kb after being cropped to a certain size. My question is, is it still worth embedding the database with image paths or should they simply be stored as they are right now? If storing images in the database is still ill-advised in this case, is there a formal way to store image paths?
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. If this question doesn't belong here, I'll be happy to move it.
If the images are user data, rather than part of your application's code or theme, then storing the images in the database is a good idea, because…
Backups are easier to manage if all you have to back up is the database. On the other hand, if you store some application data in the database and some in the filesystem, then you'll have to coordinate the backup schedules of your database and your filesystem to ensure that the two are consistent.
If you have a database administrator at your disposal, then great! Your backups should already be taken care of. If not, then database backups may be slightly tricky to set up, but once you do have a backup system, it can be better than filesystem backups. For example, many database systems have support for streaming replication.
If your application is load-balanced and served by a pool of multiple webservers, then you'll either have to replicate the data to all of the machines, or share them among your servers using a network filesystem.
Of course, having the images on a filesystem also has its advantages, namely in performance and simplicity, since most webservers are built to serve static files. A hybrid approach could give you the best of both worlds:
The images stored in the database would be the authoritative data.
Your application can have a feature to extract them as files in their local filesystem as a kind of cache. That cache can be rebuilt at any time, since it is not authoritative.
The webserver can then serve the files directly from the filesystem.
There are several reasons why I think storing images in a database is a bad idea:
1) The server will have timestamp info associated with files that the database won't keep track of. if you ever need to this for forensics reasons, the DB solution will likely be limited in this regard. Feel free to save info about images uploaded regarding IP info, timestamp, etc. in the DB though too.
2) If you ever want these files used by, say, another system/service you'll have to constantly reference the database and interact with it, when you could far more easily just target a specific folder.
3) Any time an image needs to be retrieved, you have to open a connection to the database just to generate it. This may add extra code and steps to things that could be easier to implement by pointing to a folder.
To avoid naming collisions, if I were on a Linux box, I'd use something like a Unix timestamp as a prefix to the filename when it's saved, or simply use that (+ maybe a short random #) as the image ID altogether. So instead of 'jane-image.jpg', it'd be '1407369600_img3547.jpg'. Then, just put a reference to that in the DB and viola, that's a random enough ID where there should never be a collision, unless time starts flowing backwards. Whatever the Windows timestamp equivalent is would be used, obviously.
NOTE: What you're doing now isn't bad and from what it sounds like it may work best for you...but generally speaking I try not to put everything in the hands of a database, just because I can. But that's me :)
I searched for this but only found ways to save the image as a blob to the database.
What I would like to do is to save the image location in the database and then retrieve the file automatically from the location instead of saving it as a blob into the database.
Does this make any sense at all? Or is it better and faster and cheaper to just save the image files into the database as a blob?
Depending on the locale i might have to get a different picture.
Thanks for your help!
I have experience with both (saving an image as a blob in a RDBMS) and only storing the link to it in a filesystem/url manner. What I have come to realize is the first approach is plain no scalable.
Here is a rather biased list of things about each approach.
Approach 1. Saving images as blobs:
Cons:
When the number of images increase, so does your database size and
you are limited to the filesystem your RDBMS engine runs on.
When you want to retrieve a large number of these blobs, and if they
are big in size, you waste IO/bandwdith and put a strain on your
RDBMS engine. You ideally want it to have short queries that execute
fast and move a little amount of bytes around. You just can't get
that if you save the data as a BLOB in your relational database.
While some might argue that for repeatable queries caching will
help, I will argue that I if those huge chunks of data weren't there
in the first place, I wouldn't have to put them in cache.
There is no reliable way for a db admin/ content manager to easily
retrieve the contents a blob that is in db, for example, to verify
if an image is broken. He would have to connect to the db and
extract the BLOB bytes in some format and then view it. Or
alternatively you can build some page to do that for him but that
would be a badly put together gimmicks in my honest opinion.
Pros:
You don't have to rely on file systems being available or external
systems on which you host your images to be available. You would
probably write a bit less code and you will have more control over
your code since all the stuff you want is in your RDBMS.
Approach 2. Saving images as a link to a filesystem/urls
Pros:
Greatly alleviates performance strain on your RDBMS engine.
If you store the images as links, a system admin/ content manager
can easily check them by just copying the link in a browser and
verifying it renders properly.
If you don't use an external image hosting service but rather an
internal, you still retain a great amount of control while having
the possibility in future to add more image hosting servers/
filesystems.
If you have a large amount of pictures being retrieved and they are
not hosted by you, you can distribute a lot of network load thus
making load times snappier.
Cons:
Things will be a bit decentralized adding some complexity to your application. If you are using an external hosting service, it might be down and you can have no control over it.
In conclusion, I wholeheartedly recommend using the second approach.
In general I agree with #baba's answer.
However it really depends on the number of and sizes of the images. If all the images are small thumbnails then I would store them in the database, so that everything is in one place.
It's also possible to do both...as long as the storage space is available for both the database and filesystem. This gives you the best of both worlds and a built-in backup.
This question already has answers here:
Closed 13 years ago.
Possible Duplicates:
Which is more secure: filesystem or database?
User images - database vs. filesystem storage
store image in database or in a system file ?
I can't decide which one I should follow. Can you guys give some opinions? Should I store my images in the file-system or DB? (I would like to prevent others from stealing my images)
When you answer this question, please include comparisons of the security, performances etc.
Thanks.
Exact Duplicate: User Images: Database or filesystem storage?
Exact Duplicate: Storing images in database: Yea or nay?
Exact Duplicate: Should I store my images in the database or folders?
Exact Duplicate: Would you store binary data in database or folders?
Exact Duplicate: Store pictures as files or or the database for a web app?
Exact Duplicate: Storing a small number of images: blob or fs?
Exact Duplicate: store image in filesystem or database?
Moving your images into a database and writing the code to extract the image may be more hassle than it's worth. It will all go back to the business requirements surrounding the need to protect the images, or the requirement for performance.
I'd suggest sticking to the tried and true system of storing the filepath or directory location in the DB, and keeping the files on disk. Here's why:
A filesystem is easier to maintain. Some thought has to be put into the structure and organization of the images. i.e. a directory for each customer, and a subdirectory for each [Attribute-X] and another subfolder for each [Attribute-Y]. Keeping too many images in one directory will end up slowing down the file access (i.e. hundreds of thousands)
If the idea of storing in a DB is a counter-measure against filesystem loss, (i.e. a disk goes down, or a directory is deleted by accident), then I'd counter with the suggestions that when you use source control, it's no problem to retrieve any lost/missing/delete files.
If you ever need to scale and move to a content distribution scenario, you'd have to move out back to the filesystem or perform a big extract to push out to the providers.
It also goes with the saying: "keep structured data in a database". Microsoft has an article on Managing Unstructured Data.
If security is an issue to be addressed, the filesystem has a whole structure with ACLs. Reinventing the wheel on security may be out of scope in the business requirements.
A large amount of discussion for this topic is also found at:
Question 3748
Question 561447
Having your images stored as varbinary or a blob of some kind (depending on your platform), I'd suggest it's more hassle than it's worth. The effort that you'll need to extend means more code that you'll have to maintain, unit test, and defend against defects.
If your environment can support SQL Server 2008, you can have the best of both worlds with their new FileStream datatype in SQL 2008.
An MSDN article is touting the FileStream datatype in SQL 2008 as high performance.
SQL Skills has a great article with some SQL 2008 Filestream performance measurements.
Here is an article addressing varbinary vs. FileStream and performance of both datatypes.
If you are a SQL Mag subscriber, you can see a great article at SQL Mag on SQL 2008 FileStream.
Microsoft Research article:To Blob or Not To Blob
I'd love to see studies in real-world scenarios with large user bases like Flickr or Facebook.
Again, it all goes back to your business requirements. Good luck!
It doesn't matter where you store them in terms of preventing "theft". If you deliver the bytestream to a browser, it can be intercepted and saved by anyone. There's no way to prevent that (I'm assuming you're talking about delivering the images to a browser).
If you're just talking about securing images on the machine itself, it also doesn't matter. The operating system can be locked down as securely as the database, preventing anyone from getting at the images.
In terms of performance (when presenting images to a browser), I personally think it'll be faster serving from a filesystem. You have to present the images in separate HTTP transactions anyway, which would almost certainly require multiple trips to the database. I suspect (although I have no hard data) that it would be faster to store the image URLs in the database which point to static images on the file system - then the act of getting an image is a simple file open by the web server rather than running code to access the database.
You're probably going to have to get a whole ton of "but the filesystem is a DB" answers. This isn't one of them.
The filesystem option depends on many factors, for example, does the server have write premissisons to the directory? (And yes, I have seen servers where apache couldn't write to DocumentRoot.)
If you want 100% cross-compatibility across platforms, then the Database option is the best way to go. It'll also let you store image-related metadata such as a user ID, the date uploaded, and even alternate versions of the same image (such as cached thumbnails).
On the down side, you need to write custom code to read images from the DB and serve them to the user, while any standard web server would just let you send the images as they are.
When it comes to the bottom line, though, you should just choose the option that fits your project, and your server configuration.
Store them in FileSystem, store the file path in the DB.
Of course you can make this scalable and distributed, you just need to keep the images dirs synched between them (for JackM). Or use a shared storage connected to multiple web frontend servers.
Anyway, the stealing part was covered in your other question and is basically impossible. People that can access the images will always be able (with more or less work) to save them locally ... even if it means "print-screen" and paste into photoshop and saving.
It depends on how many images you expect to handle, and what you have to do with them. I have an application that needs to temporarily store between 100K and several million images a day. I write them in 2gb contiguous blocks to the filesystem, storing the image identifier, filename, beginning position and length in a database.
For retrieval I just keep the indices in memory, the files open read only and seek back and forth to fetch them. I could find no faster way to do it. It is far faster than finding and loading an individual file. Windows can get pretty slow once you've dumped that many individual files into the filesystem.
I suppose it could contribute to security, since the images would be somewhat difficult to retrieve without the index data.
For scalability, it would not take long to put a web service in front of it and distribute it across several machines.
For a web application I look after, we store the images in the database, but make sure they're well cached in the filesystem.
A request from one of the web server frontends for an image requires a quick memcache
check to see if the image has changed in the database and, if not, serves it from the filesystem. If it has changed it fetches it from the central database and puts a copy in the filesystem.
This gives most of the advantages of storing them in the filesystem while keeping some
of the advantages of database - we only have one location for all the data which makes
backups easier and means we can scale across quite a few machines without issue. It
also doesn't put excessive load on the database.
If you want your application to be scalable, do not use a file system on the actual web servers. You can store the location of files in a persistent datastore such as a database or a NoSQL solution.
For an AWS solution to this for example you should:
Store the images on S3
Save the S3 key to the database
Serve yourimages on S3 through cloudfront (Amazon CDN)
Saving your files to the DB will provide a some security in terms that another user would need access to the DB in order to retrieve the files, but, as far as efficiency goes, a sql query for every image loaded, leaving all the load to the server side. Do yourself a favor and find a way to protect your images inside the filesystem, they are many.
The biggest out-of-the-box advantage of a database is that it can be accessed from anywhere on the network, which is essential if you have more than one server.
If you want to access a filesystem from other machines you need to set up some kind of sharing scheme, which could add complexity and could have synchronization issues.
If you do go with storing images in the database, you can still use local (unshared) disks as caches to reduce the strain on the DB. You'd just need to query the DB for a timestamp or something to see if the file is still up-to-date (if you allow files that can change).
If the issue is scalability you'll take a massive loss by moving things into the database. You can round-robin webservers via DNS but adding the overhead of both a CGI process and a database lookup to each image is madness. It also makes your database that much harder to maintain and your images that much harder to process.
As to the other part of your question, you can secure access to a file as easily as a database record, but at the end of the day as long as there is an URL that returns a file you have limited options to prevent that URL being used (at least without making cookies and/or javascript compulsory).
Store files in a file server, and store primitive data in a database. While file servers (especially HTTP-based) scale well, database servers do not. Don't mix them together.
If you need to edit, manage, or otherwise maintain the images, you should store it outside the database.
Also, the filesystem has many security features that a database does not.
The database is good for storing pointers (file paths) to the actual data.
I'm adding some functionality to my site so that users can upload their own profile pictures, so I was wondering about whether to store them in the database as a BLOB, or put them in the file system.
I found a question similar to this here: Storing images in DB: Yea or Nay, but the answers given were geared more towards people expecting many many thousands or even millions of images, whereas I'm more concerned about small images (JPEGs up to maybe 150x150 pixels), and small numbers of them: perhaps up to one or two thousand.
What are the feelings about DB BLOB vs Filesystem for this scenario? How do clients go with caching images from the DB vs from the filesystem?
If BLOBs stored in the DB are the way to go - is there anything I should know about where to store them? Since I imagine that a majority of my users won't be uploading a picture, should I create a user_pics table to (outer) join to the regular users table when needed?
Edit: I'm reopening this question, because it's not a duplicate of those two you linked to. This question is specifically about the pros/cons of using a DB or FS for a SMALL number of images. As I said above, the other question is targeted towards people who need to store thousands upon thousands of large images.
To answer parts of your question:
How do clients go with caching images from the DB vs from the filesystem?
For a database: Have a last_modified field in your database. Use the Last-Modified HTTP header so the client's browser can cache properly. Be sure to send the appropriate responses when the browser requests for an image "if newer" (can't recall what it's called; some HTTP request header).
For a filesystem: Do the same thing, but with the file's modified time.
If BLOBs stored in the DB are the way to go - is there anything I should know about where to store them? Since I imagine that a majority of my users won't be uploading a picture, should I create a user_pics table to (outer) join to the regular users table when needed?
I would put the BLOB and related metadata in its own table, with some kind of relation between it and your user table. Doing this will make it easier to optimize the table storage method for your data, makes things tidier, and leaves room for expandability (e.g. a general "files" table).
I once faced a similar question with a small DMS for pdf files. The scenario was different from yours: A maximum of may be 100 files with sizes up to 10 MB each - not what you expect for profile pictures. But the answer a friend gave me back then applies to your case as well:
Use each storage system for what it is designed to do.
Store data in a database. Store files in a file system.
This is not the ultimate answer(*), but its a good rule of thumb for starters.
I have never heard of the Windows FS being slow and sometimes unreliable, as Aaron Digulla states in his answer. If there are such problems, this certainly needs to be factored in. But for avatar pictures, it does not strike me as important.
(*) I know, I know, 42...
DB is optimized for latency, transactions, etc.
Image storage is optimized for read latency, storage cost, etc.
A blob store is ideal for storing millions of images. I work on SeaweedFS. It was based on Facebook's design for storing their user photos.
What would be more convenient, from the perspective of serving them, writing the code to serve them, backup procedures, etc.? You want the right answer for you, not the right answer for someone else.
From my point of view anything what may be left outside of database should stay outside. It may be file system or separate tables which you do not replicate or backup every day. It makes database much lighter, it grows slower and it easier to understand and maintain.
If you are on MSSQL make sure that blobs are stored in separate data file. Not in PRIMARY as everything else.
On Windows, put as much as you can in the database. The filesystem is somewhat slow and sometimes even unreliable.
On Linux, you have more options. Here, you should consider moving big files into a filesystem and just keep the name in the DB. If you use a modern filesystem like Ext3 or ReiseFS, you can even create many small files with pretty good performance.
You also need to take into account how you can access the data. If you have everything in the DB, you have one access path, need not worry about another set of permissions, but you have to deal with the extra complexity of reading/writing BLOBs. In many DBs, BLOBs can't be searched.
On the filesystem, you can run other tools on your data which isn't possible if the files are stored in a DB.
I would store them in the database:
Backup/restore is easy (if you backup files and also the database, point-in-time recovery is more complicated)
Transactions in the db mean you should never end up pointing at a file-name that is not there
Less chance someone is going to figure out a sneaky way of putting a script onto your server via a dodgy image upload hack
Since you are talking about a small number of images, ease of use/administration should take preference over performance issues which are debated in the linked questions.
I think there is a managability advantage storing them in the database; they can be backed up and restored consistently with the other data - you won't forget to delete obsolete ones (well, you might, but it's a bit less likely), and if you migrate the database to another machine, the images go with it.
Locked. This question and its answers are locked because the question is off-topic but has historical significance. It is not currently accepting new answers or interactions.
So I'm using an app that stores images heavily in the DB. What's your outlook on this? I'm more of a type to store the location in the filesystem, than store it directly in the DB.
What do you think are the pros/cons?
I'm in charge of some applications that manage many TB of images. We've found that storing file paths in the database to be best.
There are a couple of issues:
database storage is usually more expensive than file system storage
you can super-accelerate file system access with standard off the shelf products
for example, many web servers use the operating system's sendfile() system call to asynchronously send a file directly from the file system to the network interface. Images stored in a database don't benefit from this optimization.
things like web servers, etc, need no special coding or processing to access images in the file system
databases win out where transactional integrity between the image and metadata are important.
it is more complex to manage integrity between db metadata and file system data
it is difficult (within the context of a web application) to guarantee data has been flushed to disk on the filesystem
As with most issues, it's not as simple as it sounds. There are cases where it would make sense to store the images in the database.
You are storing images that are
changing dynamically, say invoices and you wanted
to get an invoice as it was on 1 Jan
2007?
The government wants you to maintain 6 years of history
Images stored in the database do not require a different backup strategy. Images stored on filesystem do
It is easier to control access to the images if they are in a database. Idle admins can access any folder on disk. It takes a really determined admin to go snooping in a database to extract the images
On the other hand there are problems associated
Require additional code to extract
and stream the images
Latency may be
slower than direct file access
Heavier load on the database server
File store. Facebook engineers had a great talk about it. One take away was to know the practical limit of files in a directory.
Needle in a Haystack: Efficient Storage of Billions of Photos
This might be a bit of a long shot, but if you're using (or planning on using) SQL Server 2008 I'd recommend having a look at the new FileStream data type.
FileStream solves most of the problems around storing the files in the DB:
The Blobs are actually stored as files in a folder.
The Blobs can be accessed using either a database connection or over the filesystem.
Backups are integrated.
Migration "just works".
However SQL's "Transparent Data Encryption" does not encrypt FileStream objects, so if that is a consideration, you may be better off just storing them as varbinary.
From the MSDN Article:
Transact-SQL statements can insert, update, query, search, and back up FILESTREAM data. Win32 file system interfaces provide streaming access to the data.
FILESTREAM uses the NT system cache for caching file data. This helps reduce any effect that FILESTREAM data might have on Database Engine performance. The SQL Server buffer pool is not used; therefore, this memory is available for query processing.
File paths in the DB is definitely the way to go - I've heard story after story from customers with TB of images that it became a nightmare trying to store any significant amount of images in a DB - the performance hit alone is too much.
In my experience, sometimes the simplest solution is to name the images according to the primary key. So it's easy to find the image that belongs to a particular record, and vice versa. But at the same time you're not storing anything about the image in the database.
The trick here is to not become a zealot.
One thing to note here is that no one in the pro file system camp has listed a particular file system. Does this mean that everything from FAT16 to ZFS handily beats every database?
No.
The truth is that many databases beat many files systems, even when we're only talking about raw speed.
The correct course of action is to make the right decision for your precise scenario, and to do that, you'll need some numbers and some use case estimates.
In places where you MUST guarantee referential integrity and ACID compliance, storing images in the database is required.
You cannot transactionaly guarantee that the image and the meta-data about that image stored in the database refer to the same file. In other words, it is impossible to guarantee that the file on the filesystem is only ever altered at the same time and in the same transaction as the metadata.
As others have said SQL 2008 comes with a Filestream type that allows you to store a filename or identifier as a pointer in the db and automatically stores the image on your filesystem which is a great scenario.
If you're on an older database, then I'd say that if you're storing it as blob data, then you're really not going to get anything out of the database in the way of searching features, so it's probably best to store an address on a filesystem, and store the image that way.
That way you also save space on your filesystem, as you are only going to save the exact amount of space, or even compacted space on the filesystem.
Also, you could decide to save with some structure or elements that allow you to browse the raw images in your filesystem without any db hits, or transfer the files in bulk to another system, hard drive, S3 or another scenario - updating the location in your program, but keep the structure, again without much of a hit trying to bring the images out of your db when trying to increase storage.
Probably, it would also allow you to throw some caching element, based on commonly hit image urls into your web engine/program, so you're saving yourself there as well.
Small static images (not more than a couple of megs) that are not frequently edited, should be stored in the database. This method has several benefits including easier portability (images are transferred with the database), easier backup/restore (images are backed up with the database) and better scalability (a file system folder with thousands of little thumbnail files sounds like a scalability nightmare to me).
Serving up images from a database is easy, just implement an http handler that serves the byte array returned from the DB server as a binary stream.
Here's an interesting white paper on the topic.
To BLOB or Not To BLOB: Large Object Storage in a Database or a Filesystem
The answer is "It depends." Certainly it would depend upon the database server and its approach to blob storage. It also depends on the type of data being stored in blobs, as well as how that data is to be accessed.
Smaller sized files can be efficiently stored and delivered using the database as the storage mechanism. Larger files would probably be best stored using the file system, especially if they will be modified/updated often. (blob fragmentation becomes an issue in regards to performance.)
Here's an additional point to keep in mind. One of the reasons supporting the use of a database to store the blobs is ACID compliance. However, the approach that the testers used in the white paper, (Bulk Logged option of SQL Server,) which doubled SQL Server throughput, effectively changed the 'D' in ACID to a 'd,' as the blob data was not logged with the initial writes for the transaction. Therefore, if full ACID compliance is an important requirement for your system, halve the SQL Server throughput figures for database writes when comparing file I/O to database blob I/O.
One thing that I haven't seen anyone mention yet but is definitely worth noting is that there are issues associated with storing large amounts of images in most filesystems too. For example if you take the approach mentioned above and name each image file after the primary key, on most filesystems you will run into issues if you try to put all of the images in one big directory once you reach a very large number of images (e.g. in the hundreds of thousands or millions).
Once common solution to this is to hash them out into a balanced tree of subdirectories.
Something nobody has mentioned is that the DB guarantees atomic actions, transactional integrity and deals with concurrency. Even referentially integrity is out of the window with a filesystem - so how do you know your file names are really still correct?
If you have your images in a file-system and someone is reading the file as you're writing a new version or even deleting the file - what happens?
We use blobs because they're easier to manage (backup, replication, transfer) too. They work well for us.
The problem with storing only filepaths to images in a database is that the database's integrity can no longer be forced.
If the actual image pointed to by the filepath becomes unavailable, the database unwittingly has an integrity error.
Given that the images are the actual data being sought after, and that they can be managed easier (the images won't suddenly disappear) in one integrated database rather than having to interface with some kind of filesystem (if the filesystem is independently accessed, the images MIGHT suddenly "disappear"), I'd go for storing them directly as a BLOB or such.
At a company where I used to work we stored 155 million images in an Oracle 8i (then 9i) database. 7.5TB worth.
Normally, I'm storngly against taking the most expensive and hardest to scale part of your infrastructure (the database) and putting all load into it. On the other hand: It greatly simplifies backup strategy, especially when you have multiple web servers and need to somehow keep the data synchronized.
Like most other things, It depends on the expected size and Budget.
We have implemented a document imaging system that stores all it's images in SQL2005 blob fields. There are several hundred GB at the moment and we are seeing excellent response times and little or no performance degradation. In addition, fr regulatory compliance, we have a middleware layer that archives newly posted documents to an optical jukebox system which exposes them as a standard NTFS file system.
We've been very pleased with the results, particularly with respect to:
Ease of Replication and Backup
Ability to easily implement a document versioning system
If this is web-based application then there could be advantages to storing the images on a third-party storage delivery network, such as Amazon's S3 or the Nirvanix platform.
Assumption: Application is web enabled/web based
I'm surprised no one has really mentioned this ... delegate it out to others who are specialists -> use a 3rd party image/file hosting provider.
Store your files on a paid online service like
Amazon S3
Moso Cloud Storage
Another StackOverflow threads talking about this here.
This thread explains why you should use a 3rd party hosting provider.
It's so worth it. They store it efficiently. No bandwith getting uploaded from your servers to client requests, etc.
If you're not on SQL Server 2008 and you have some solid reasons for putting specific image files in the database, then you could take the "both" approach and use the file system as a temporary cache and use the database as the master repository.
For example, your business logic can check if an image file exists on disc before serving it up, retrieving from the database when necessary. This buys you the capability of multiple web servers and fewer sync issues.
I'm not sure how much of a "real world" example this is, but I currently have an application out there that stores details for a trading card game, including the images for the cards. Granted the record count for the database is only 2851 records to date, but given the fact that certain cards have are released multiple times and have alternate artwork, it was actually more efficient sizewise to scan the "primary square" of the artwork and then dynamically generate the border and miscellaneous effects for the card when requested.
The original creator of this image library created a data access class that renders the image based on the request, and it does it quite fast for viewing and individual card.
This also eases deployment/updates when new cards are released, instead of zipping up an entire folder of images and sending those down the pipe and ensuring the proper folder structure is created, I simply update the database and have the user download it again. This currently sizes up to 56MB, which isn't great, but I'm working on an incremental update feature for future releases. In addition, there is a "no images" version of the application that allows those over dial-up to get the application without the download delay.
This solution has worked great to date since the application itself is targeted as a single instance on the desktop. There is a web site where all of this data is archived for online access, but I would in no way use the same solution for this. I agree the file access would be preferable because it would scale better to the frequency and volume of requests being made for the images.
Hopefully this isn't too much babble, but I saw the topic and wanted to provide some my insights from a relatively successful small/medium scale application.
SQL Server 2008 offers a solution that has the best of both worlds : The filestream data type.
Manage it like a regular table and have the performance of the file system.
It depends on the number of images you are going to store and also their sizes. I have used databases to store images in the past and my experience has been fairly good.
IMO, Pros of using database to store images are,
A. You don't need FS structure to hold your images
B. Database indexes perform better than FS trees when more number of items are to be stored
C. Smartly tuned database perform good job at caching the query results
D. Backups are simple. It also works well if you have replication set up and content is delivered from a server near to user. In such cases, explicit synchronization is not required.
If your images are going to be small (say < 64k) and the storage engine of your db supports inline (in record) BLOBs, it improves performance further as no indirection is required (Locality of reference is achieved).
Storing images may be a bad idea when you are dealing with small number of huge sized images. Another problem with storing images in db is that, metadata like creation, modification dates must handled by your application.
I have recently created a PHP/MySQL app which stores PDFs/Word files in a MySQL table (as big as 40MB per file so far).
Pros:
Uploaded files are replicated to backup server along with everything else, no separate backup strategy is needed (peace of mind).
Setting up the web server is slightly simpler because I don't need to have an uploads/ folder and tell all my applications where it is.
I get to use transactions for edits to improve data integrity - I don't have to worry about orphaned and missing files
Cons:
mysqldump now takes a looooong time because there is 500MB of file data in one of the tables.
Overall not very memory/cpu efficient when compared to filesystem
I'd call my implementation a success, it takes care of backup requirements and simplifies the layout of the project. The performance is fine for the 20-30 people who use the app.
Im my experience I had to manage both situations: images stored in database and images on the file system with path stored in db.
The first solution, images in database, is somewhat "cleaner" as your data access layer will have to deal only with database objects; but this is good only when you have to deal with low numbers.
Obviously database access performance when you deal with binary large objects is degrading, and the database dimensions will grow a lot, causing again performance loss... and normally database space is much more expensive than file system space.
On the other hand having large binary objects stored in file system will cause you to have backup plans that have to consider both database and file system, and this can be an issue for some systems.
Another reason to go for file system is when you have to share your images data (or sounds, video, whatever) with third party access: in this days I'm developing a web app that uses images that have to be accessed from "outside" my web farm in such a way that a database access to retrieve binary data is simply impossible. So sometimes there are also design considerations that will drive you to a choice.
Consider also, when making this choice, if you have to deal with permission and authentication when accessing binary objects: these requisites normally can be solved in an easier way when data are stored in db.
I once worked on an image processing application. We stored the uploaded images in a directory that was something like /images/[today's date]/[id number]. But we also extracted the metadata (exif data) from the images and stored that in the database, along with a timestamp and such.
In a previous project i stored images on the filesystem, and that caused a lot of headaches with backups, replication, and the filesystem getting out of sync with the database.
In my latest project i'm storing images in the database, and caching them on the filesystem, and it works really well. I've had no problems so far.
Second the recommendation on file paths. I've worked on a couple of projects that needed to manage large-ish asset collections, and any attempts to store things directly in the DB resulted in pain and frustration long-term.
The only real "pro" I can think of regarding storing them in the DB is the potential for easy of individual image assets. If there are no file paths to use, and all images are streamed straight out of the DB, there's no danger of a user finding files they shouldn't have access to.
That seems like it would be better solved with an intermediary script pulling data from a web-inaccessible file store, though. So the DB storage isn't REALLY necessary.
The word on the street is that unless you are a database vendor trying to prove that your database can do it (like, let's say Microsoft boasting about Terraserver storing a bajillion images in SQL Server) it's not a very good idea. When the alternative - storing images on file servers and paths in the database is so much easier, why bother? Blob fields are kind of like the off-road capabilities of SUVs - most people don't use them, those who do usually get in trouble, and then there are those who do, but only for the fun of it.
Storing an image in the database still means that the image data ends up somewhere in the file system but obscured so that you cannot access it directly.
+ves:
database integrity
its easy to manage since you don't have to worry about keeping the filesystem in sync when an image is added or deleted
-ves:
performance penalty -- a database lookup is usually slower that a filesystem lookup
you cannot edit the image directly (crop, resize)
Both methods are common and practiced. Have a look at the advantages and disadvantages. Either way, you'll have to think about how to overcome the disadvantages. Storing in database usually means tweaking database parameters and implement some kind of caching. Using filesystem requires you to find some way of keeping filesystem+database in sync.