Databases can store what are known as BLOB's, Binary Large Objects. However if you want to store a lot of these BLOB's, I would be thinking about storing the user metadata in a database and having a "pointer(s)", which could be filepath(s)) to the BLOB object(s) which are stored as file(s) under the file system.

You probably do NOT want each of your users to have an account on your server machine, therefore the OS cannot provide any security for file access. Your application will have to do that.

One user might have 500MB of BLOB's, but only his meta-data is stored in the actual DB. There are of course significant complications with this. Think about the question in terms of what you are trying to do (how many users, how much total data, how much data per user, etc) and re-post a more detailed question that relates to your specific job at hand.

In reply to Re: Where to store images? by Marshall
in thread Where to store images? by AlfaProject

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.