What is the best way to store a series of images in MySQL?

I've been working on a SQL model for my website, and I'm really conflicted on how to store these images in my database for use around the site.

First, each profile will contain a relevant 10 images total. 4 screenshots, with thumbnails, and two extra images. These images will be used all around the site.

Is storing the image path for each image in it's own column fine? A buddy tells me that I should place all images i开发者_运维问答n it's own table and cross-reference them for better performance. I'll be calling all sorts of information from the profiles around the same time with the images themselves though.

I'm just wondering what the common practice for something such as this is.

Again, I'm not storing the actual image in the database - just the image path.

Store images on your file system and store paths in database..

If profile has more than 1 images then create a separate table for images.

Profile Table:

id | name | etc | etc
---------------------
1  | abc  | etc | etc
2  | xyz  | etc | etc

Image Table:

id | profile_id |     image_url     | image_type
-------------------------------------------------
 1 |     1      | images/image1.jpg | screenshot
 2 |     1      | images/image2.jpg | other
 3 |     2      | images/image3.jpg | screenshot 

Now you can create different functions to get images for specific profile. For example:

getProfileImages( profile_id, image_type=NULL ) {
  // run query by joining profiles and images tables.
  // return images paths
}

If you are storing multiple images per profile, you should make an images table. This will cause a table join (usually poor performance) every time you look up the images for a profile, but keeps the database normalized.

You could create some other encoding, such as a comma separated list, but you will require processing for that as well, but string parsing is also usually poor performance, and might incur bugs.

I suggest you go with the separate table at first, and if you find that it performs poorly, attempt to optimize it.