Storing image in database directly or as base64 data

Question

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   new Imagick  image jpg     data    image- gt getImageBlob     data    mysqli- gt real escape string  data    mysqli- gt query  INSERT INTO images  data  VALUES    data        and then display the image with   lt img src  data image jpeg base64      base64 encode  data          gt    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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I recommend looking at modern databases like NoSQL and also I agree with user1252434 s post  For instance I am storing a few  lt  500kb PNGs as base64 on my Mongo db with binary set to true with no performance hit at all  Mongo can be used to store large files like 10MB videos and that can offer huge time saving advantages in metadata searches for those videos  see storing large objects and files in mongodb

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

I contend that images  files  are NOT usually stored in a database base64 encoded  Instead  they are stored in their raw binary form in a binary  blob  column  or file    Base64 is only used as a transport mechanism  not for storage  For example  you can embed a base64 encoded image into an XML document or an email message   Base64 is also stream friendly  You can encode and decode on the fly  without knowing the total size of the data    While base64 is fine for transport  do not store your images base64 encoded   Base64 provides no checksum or anything of any value for storage   Base64 encoding increases the storage requirement by 33  over a raw binary format  It also increases the amount of data that must be read from persistent storage  which is still generally the largest bottleneck in computing  It s generally faster to read less bytes and encode them on the fly  Only if your system is CPU bound instead of IO bound  and you re regularly outputting the image in base64  then consider storing in base64   Inline images  base64 encoded images embedded in HTML  are a bottleneck themselves--you re sending 33  more data over the wire  and doing it serially  the web browser has to wait on the inline images before it can finish downloading the page HTML    If you still wish to store images base64 encoded  please  whatever you do  make sure you don t store base64 encoded data in a UTF8 column then index it

User · Answer

Just want to give one example why we decided to store image in DB not files or CDN  it is storing images of signatures  We have tried to do so via CDN  cloud storage  files  and finally decided to store in DB and happy about the decision as it was proven us right in our subsequent events when we moved  upgraded our scripts and migrated the sites serveral times  For my case  we wanted the signatures to be with the records that belong to the author of documents  Storing in files format risks missing them or deleted by accident  We store it as a blob binary format in MySQL  and later as based64 encoded image in a text field  The decision to change to based64 was due to smaller size as result for some reason  and faster loading  Blob was slowing down the page load for some reason  In our case  this solution to store signature images in DB   whether as blob or based64   was driven by   Most signature images are very small  We don t need to index the signature images stored in DB  Index is done on the primary key  We may have to move or switch servers  moving physical images files to different servers  may cause the images not found due to links change  it is embarrassed to ask the author to re-sign their signatures  it is more secured saving in the DB as compared to exposing it as files which can be downloaded if security is compromised  Storing in DB allows us better control over its access  any future migrations  change of web design  hosting  servers  we have zero worries about reconcilating the signature file names against the physical files  it is all in the DB   AC

User · Answer

I came across this really great talk by Facebook engineers about the Efficient Storage of Billions of Photos in a database

[mysql] Storing image in database directly or as base64 data?

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