How to create a proper photo album application in PHP? [closed]

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I've worked with photo albums before, and I've found 2 methods of managing them through PHP:

1. Store the images in the database or
2. Store them in the filesystem

Each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

With the database, I can store the time of the upload, where it was uploaded from, etc. It's harder to do something like that with the filesystem (like a manifest.json file for non-file related data).

But with the filesystem, it just feels nicer for some reason, because, you know, photos are images, and are meant to be stored in a filesystem. Just feels right.

But what is the proper way of making a photo album that displays things like:

1. The photo (of course)
2. The time it was uploaded
3. Who you are with/want to tag (or a general caption)

etc.

What is the RIGHT way of going about this?

Answer 1

One way you can store all of the information, and using the file system for the images is by combining the two!

If you have a table containing a list of the images, each with the images filename, the time it was uploaded, and a caption.

Then, you could write a simple class like below to manage each image:

class Image {
    private $info;
    public function __construct(int $id, $mysqli) {
        $info = $mysqli->query("SELECT * FROM `images` WHERE `id`=" . $id);
        $this->info = array();
        $this->info["id"] = $info["id"];
        $this->info["src"] = "/my/path/" . $info["name"] . "." . $info["type"];
        $this->info["upload"] = strtotime($info["upload"]);
        $this->info["tags"] = json_decode($info["tags"], true);
    }

    public function Id() { return $this->info["id"]; }
    public function Src() { return $this->info["src"]; }
    public function Upload() { return $this->info["upload"]; }
    public function Tags() { return $this->info["tags"]; }
}

This simple class would work if you have a table in your database like this:

+----------------------------------+------------+-----------+-----------------+-------------+
| id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT   | name TEXT  | type TEXT | upload DATETIME | tags TEXT   |
+----------------------------------+------------+-----------+-----------------+-------------+

So now, if you know the ID of the image you want to get, you can get it with the following code:

$id = 57;
$img = new Image($id, $connection);

Now we can get information on the image!

echo $img->Id() // output: 57
echo $img->Src() // output: /my/path/image.png
echo $img->Upload() // output: 1375858084

The Tags() function will return an array, JSON decoded from the column in the database.

Answer 2

1. I would set a number to each image, an auto incrementing number.
2. store them in the file system
3. store the id in the database with the full file name and all details you want like the filename
4. when retrieving it will read out of the database, get the propper picture and display the propper info

Answer 3

In my past experiences making image galleries and photo albums has always been a database for sure. You can still have the image uploaded into a specific directory while maintaining additional data such as the things you mentioned.

I find with a database you also have more control of what you want to display or hide using queries which also translates into a lot of more work for a filesystem in the end.

Although I don't necessarily think one way is wrong because if it works then it works.

Answer 4

Storing images in Database definitely not a good idea. If your application carrying huge number of images it may affects the DB performance or even it may crash if it has more requests.

Good practice is store images in file system and store image id in the Database table and retrieve the same.

Answer 5

Better way to achieve your task is upload the photo to a directory in your server (upload/images/ or something).

Then save the details of the image in database table.

photos(photo_id, photo_path, upload_time, tags/captions)

save the relative path of the image in photo_path.

While displaying in the page get the required record from photos table and place the photo_path in the src of the image.