The best place to save an image win forms app

Question

Hi I am building an app that will/does save an image via a picturebox i will be using a remote database. before i have done this by using (blob) direct to the database but is this bad practise as it seems to be a large file in the database and as it grows will query lookups start to get slow? I know web designers usually save the image in a seperate folder then only save the url in the database can something such as this be done in a windows form app.? So for instance on the save command from the button save then ftp the image to a web path/folder then generate a url to pull it in at a later date on it's query to be viewed in the picture box? Thanks

Vulpes · Answer

There are some examples here of uploading files to and downloading files from an FTP server: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229715.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229711.aspx Another possibility would be to use a web service but I think I'd try FTP first.

Vulpes · Answer

There's a simple article here on uploading an image using a web service which you might find useful: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/13409/Image-Upload-Web-Service-in-C-NET

mike Delvotti · Answer

Thank you Sam I have been reading a bit just lately on this and web services do seem to keep popping up i must admit. I may have a practise as you suggest above.

Sam Hobbs · Answer

FTP is very reliable and common technology but web services are newer. I am not suggesting using a web service just because is newer technology but I think this is something that web services are often used for. If you can have a web service at the end where the image is going to then the client only needs to use the web service to send the image. Then the web service in the host/server could deal with putting the image somewhere and updating the database. There are many articles in this web site to help you but they sometimes use oher terminology. I do not know much about web services; I am learning too. If you want to do a quick try create a new project; a Visual C# WCF Service Libray. The project will be created so that the WcfTestClient tool is used for testing. Just build the project and it is ready for trying. It took me a few minutes to figure out what to do to try the web service.

mike Delvotti · Answer

Thanks Vulpes Appreciated. I'll study those and give it a try with the FTP i think.

mike Delvotti · Answer

Hi Vulpes yes I am at a point where i can change it to varchar is it possible then to upload the image to another destination and create a random url to save in the database as a string referenced to the image location? so even though my app runs local the image can be saved/pulled back in from a remote location? have you seen any examples working like this or is there any code examples you know of?

Vulpes · Answer

Do you actually have a choice here i.e. is the remote database expecting the image to be saved as a blob? If you have control over how the remote database saves stuff then I agree that it would be better to make this a varchar field and save the url of the image to the database rather than the image itself.