Using frameworks like Django, the file is saved onto the harddrive, and a link pointing to the file is rather stored in the Database, which is fine.
In my current API approach for uploading content, I submit the form, the part where there are images using the standard form data posting (the usual multipart/form-data).
So I simply cook up a payload that mimics the usual form-data submit using Angular, then push to an endpoint that accepts the form data submission.
Recently, I'm thinking of going full base64 images.
As in,
- User selects image to upload
- Behind the scenes (on the browser), I encode the image to base64 string
- User submits form, then the usual JSON payload is sent with the image field as base64
So something like:
{ data: 'string'
image: 'base64 string'
}
I've done the base64 image approach some time ago, and it was great (at least to me).
Are there any performance issues with going with base64 image strings for storage in Database? Any caveats to look out for?
Top comments (6)
I feel like you could lose a few benefits. Here are some things that come to mind:
I might not have your full context or could be missing something. Would love others' input to validate or invalidate my thoughts on the issue.
Ben pretty much nailed it, in can you are wondering how much space it would take for an image to be saved in db, just upload some small image on this tool codebeautify.net/base64/image-to-b... and count the characters :)
Thanks Ben.
True, didn't think of that. Scaling with embedded base64 could be catastrophic.
Yes, send the images over the wire along with the HTML.
Noted.
Great points there, something for me to ponder over. Thanks.
Is referential integrity between images and other parts of your data model important? If so, you're probably alright but remember to store and index metadata to make searching the table efficient if you need to do that for any reason. You're not going to power something the scale of Google Image Search out of that but you almost certainly aren't trying to do that anyway.
If you don't need referential integrity or if you have a lot of image data coming, then you might be better off storing them on a distributed filesystem like Mongo's GridFS, or in someone's cloud.
Of course, but from Ben's points below, I imagine even a slight growth in traffic could topple the system with embedded images.
Yep. Thanks.
I think caching might be the biggest issue. Normal images from CDNs are cached and the browser, but I dont think the base64 strings are.