Pulling BLOB image data from MySQL in PHP

Question

I was reading from a few tutorials on how to upload my image into the DB as binary opposed to putting them on the server itself, well I got it to work like this:

PHP:

$image = chunk_split(base64_encode(file_get_contents($tmpfile)));
    mysql_query("INSERT INTO images (`img_location`, `caption`, `user`, `genre`, `when`) VALUES ('$image', '$caption', '$id', '$genre', '$when')");

My issue is how do you now pull it from the database, I've read several ways of doing it, tried them all, can't figure it out, I'm not getting a MySQL error, here's how I'm trying it:

$get_pics = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM images WHERE user='$id' ");
while($get_pics2 = mysql_fetch_array($get_pics))
{
$sixfour_enc = base64_decode($get_pics2['img_location']);

$new .= "<img src=\"".$sixfour_enc."\" >";
}

This works... kind of, what's happening is that it's printing out raw binary in the IMG tag.

How do I get this to compile to a readble image again? Also, is storing the images in the database stupid? Should I just do what I usually do and store them on the server?

Thank you -mike

Answer 1

You can store images in your database if you want to (though there's nothing wrong with just storing them as files either, choose whatever is appropriate in your situation), but store the raw binary data in a BLOB (i.e. don't encode it with base64). You can embed the binary data you get from file_get_contents in your query directly, provided you use the proper escape function (mysql_real_escape_string in your case) first.

As for the outputting of the image, you can do it the way you're doing it right now, but you'll have to output it base64-encoded and with a data URI scheme like this:

echo '<img alt="embedded image" src="data:image/png;base64,' . chunk_split(base64_encode($get_pics2['img_location'])) . '">';

Note that there are some advantages and disadvantages of embedded image data. Some important disadvantages to be aware of are the severe overhead of base64 encoding (around 33% larger than original) and potential caching problems.