You can store images in MySQL as blobs. However, this is problematic for a couple of reasons:
- The images can be harder to manipulate: you must first retrieve them from the database before bulk operations can be performed.
- Except in very rare cases where the entire database is stored in RAM, MySQL databases are ultimately stored on disk. This means that your DB images are converted to blobs, inserted into a database, and then stored on disk; you can save a lot of overhead by simply storing them on disk.
Instead, consider updating your table to add an image_path field. For example:
ALTER TABLE `your_table`
ADD COLUMN `image_path` varchar(1024)
Then store your images on disk, and update the table with the image path. When you need to use the images, retrieve them from disk using the path specified.
An advantageous side-effect of this approach is that the images do not necessarily be stored on disk; you could just as easily store a URL instead of an image path, and retrieve images from any internet-connected location.
