One of my personal projects at the moment is a database of slides I have taken over the past few years (see my website for some examples, it's a bit broken just now though). I started off by using MS Access (ick!) so I'm sticking with it for now (although MySQL looks good as a replacement).

One of the fields in the database is a thumbnail of the slide. In the past I've added a few of these manually, but it's a bit of a pain to open the file in Paint Shop Pro, copy it and paste it into the DB.

I'm looking for a way to automate this process but of course Access doesn't seem to make this easy. The images go into an OLE object field (ick ick ick!).

I can dump out an existing object via DBI::ODBC but I can't work out how to create an OLE object from a file using Perl. Would something in Win32::OLE help?

Or should I just move the whole thing across to a proper database and store the images as BLOBs? I had thought about keeping the images as separate files but that makes copying/moving the database more difficult.

Kevin O'Rourke

In reply to Handling pictures with DBI and Access by kevin_i_orourke

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.