Storing Photo in LDAP

Question

I am aware that you can store photos in LDAP. But is it a good idea?

Currently, building a LDAP structure for company requirement.

Answer 1

Storing photos is a common practice for corporate LDAP directories. However, make sure that the client code loads this photo only if necessary.

Answer 2

The biggest issue we have seen is when someone wants to store 16MB Photos. The DIB will grow very large with more data used for photos than for all the other data combined.

There is also the LDAP server overhead and wire transfer load of transporting large photos.

But it is common to store small (20k) photos (like passport photos) in LDAP without performance issues.

Several security setups we have worked with show the users photos on an overhead monitor as the user swipes their security badge when they enter a secured area which is obtained from LDAP.

There are also variations on how LDAP server vendors store "large" attribute values. Some will store the large items as a BLOB in the DIB database and some create a "stream" file for each large blob of data.

-jim

Answer 3

JPEG data can be stored in the jpegPhoto attribute - allowed in the inetOrgPerson objectClass. An alternative is to store a URL in the entry which points to a server farm that hosts photos.