Photo Storage Quandry

Question

I have been contracted to store user-contributed photos for a contest run through Facebook. I'm currently having issues uploading files from Facebook to my server (I understand they strip out file variables in post requests, but all the answers I have seen simply say "use an iframe". My app is set up to be an iframe (vs. FBML, in application settings).

This is proving to be very time consuming to troubleshoot and get up and running (I tried selling just URL storage of remote pictures, which was turned down). I am considering just saving the images as a blob in my mysql database. We expect to get around ~2,000 photos of various size. What's the general take on this type of load? I've read various SO threads discussing multiple TBs of data, and filesystem being a better choice, but for maybe a gig or two, is this unreasonable?

Thanks

Answer 1

Given the number of photos it doesn't sound unreasonable to store them as blobs. I have shoe-horned similar numbers of megabyte sized pics into SQL Server with no detrimental effects to my system. However YMMV and I'd suggest that you code up a simple MySQL Db and shove 2 or 3,000 pics of the applicable size in and see how your system behaves. You should be able to do that in a very short amount of time.