PHP / MySQL Demo of Storing Images in a Database as BLOBs

Database

The database needs to have fields for:

• The MIME type, e.g. image/png, or image/jpeg - varchar
• The image data - BLOB

Retrieving Images

DON'T

The image data could be requested from the DB and directly inserted into the HTML page. However, this cretaes really huge HTML pages which take a loooooooong time to load. So...

DO

It's better to load the images from the database as seperate HTTP requests, meaning that the HTML page is small and quick to load, withe the images loading later.

See: index.php and load-thing-image.php

Uploading Images

You need to use a multi-part form for this. The data from the form then gets sent in different ways:

• Normal fields are uploaded via the $_POST super-global
• Files are uploaded into a temporary location on the server, wirth details available via the $_FILES super-global

A helper function, uploadedImageData(...), is available to help manage this process, providing the MIME type of the uploaded file, and the binary file data.

See: form-thing.php and add-thing.php