If you're dealing with a small collection of photographs (say a few
hundred rather than many thousands) do you prefer to store the image in
your database as a BLOB, or do you store the image as a file on disk and
place the filename or URL to that image in a VARCHAR in the database?

Keeping a separate file and storing the URL has some advantages, such as
being able to bit-twiddle the image at will if needed (brightness,
contrast, etc) and also it allows you to include off-server images in your collection by just pointing the URL at the image on another server. Also,
the image will probably be cached on the client's machine. And you don't
have to go through any CGI or anything like that, to display the image.

Advantage to using BLOB? Can't 'lose' an image, and by processing the
image through a CGI presumably on-the-fly manipulation could be
implemented if need.

Which do you prefer?

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Playing: "Carouselambra" by "Led Zeppelin"
from the "In through the out door" album
þ Synchronet þ Programatically generated on The ANJO BBS