Should I save images to the database itself as binary information or as a path on the FS?

Background information:

This application is .NET 4/C# Windows Forms using SQLite as it's backend. There is only one user using the database and in no way does it interact through a network.

My software needs to save images associated to a Project record. Should I save the image as binary information in the database开发者_开发百科 itself; or should I save the path to the picture on the file system and use that to retrieve it.

My concerns when saving as path is that someone might change the filename of a picture and that would essentially break my applications use.

Can anyone give some suggestions?interact through a network.

"It depends". If there are a lot of images, then all that BLOB weight may make backups increasingly painful (and indeed, may preclude some database implementations that only support limited sizes). But it works, and works well. The file system is fine as long as you only store the path relative to some unknown root, i.e. you store "foo/blah/blip.png", which is combined with configuration data to get the full path - then you can relocate the path easily. File systems have simpler backup options in some cases, but you need to marry the file-system and database backups.

In general, it is better to store them on the filesystem, with a path stored in the DB.

However, Microsoft published a white paper some time ago with research showing that files up to 150K can benefit from being put inside the DB (of course, this only pertains to SQL Server).

The question has been asked here many many times before:

Exact Duplicate: User Images: Database or filesystem storage?
Exact Duplicate: Storing images in database: Yea or nay?
Exact Duplicate: Should I store my images in the database or folders?
Exact Duplicate: Would you store binary data in database or folders?
Exact Duplicate: Store pictures as files or or the database for a web app?
Exact Duplicate: Storing a small number of images: blob or fs?
Exact Duplicate: store image in filesystem or database?

First of all have you checked the SQLite limits? If this is of no concern for you application, I would still chose the FS for storage needs simply due to overhead from getting large BLOBS from DB vs. reading a file from FS. You can mark the files as read only and hidden to lessen the chance of them being renamed... You can also store the file hash (like MD5) of a file in the DB so you can have secondary lookup option in case someone does rename the file (of course, they could move it as well in which case this would not help much)...