How to use BLOB with JSON and PHP?

Question

I have a remote database with MySQL, and I am storing photos of the users of my app on the database as a row of the database with LONGTEXT type.

I transform the phot

Answer 1

To answer your question: No, JSON doesn't support binary data, you must escape it in some way before sending it. Storing it as BLOB in MySQL is not going to fix the major infrastructure issues you have.

From what I understand you have an Android device that is uploading a picture to a PHP server, this PHP server is encoding the picture to Base64, putting that into a JSON string and then posting it to a remote(how remote is remote? same data center? across the country? across the world? in outer space orbiting the moon?) MySQL server through an HTTP interface of some sort, that MySQL server is storing the Base64 image as LONGTEXT. To get the image back, the Android Client sends a request to PHP, PHP sends a request to the remote MySQL server, PHP then has to Base64 decode the image and send it down.

This is horribly inefficient, you are going to suffer latency every step of the way.

Edit: okay it looks like this is a client side issue and not a server side issue...

If that's the case then I'd suggest checking the posts @ Uploading images to a PHP server from Android as they should have some more efficient examples.