I'm somewhat new to DNN. I'm working on a module that will look something like a myspace profile.  To do this I'll need to have a profile image. What are the image storage strategies in DNN? I've seen some posts/articles that advocate putting the images in the Database. That sounds insane to me for any number of reasons.

Are there any established ideas in place for storing images to a folder and handling renaming/indexing? I figure someone's already thought this through.

Any ideas / suggestions would be welcome.

ED

Thank you Sebastion. I'll take a look at that.

Does anyone know of any articles/posts that discuss strategies concerning this topic. Up to this point I've had a heck of a time interfacing with the documentation for DNN... Not that I'm disparaging the project. But, much of the documentation seems to reference older versions and it isn't always clear enough for this simplton to understand.

Any insights would be greatly appreciated,

ED

William Severance wrote I would agree that storage of images as blob data in the database is insane for both storage space requirements and performance. You'll find that most if not all modules simply store either a folder/filename or fileid in the database and the actual image file in the file system. Beyond that, there are a wide variety of approaches to renaming/resizing/auto-thumbnailing files on upload, controlling upload folders and upload rights, and keeping the database reference insync with the actual image files.

Saying that it's insane is a bit misleading.  If you are doing it, but not caching the files you need to retrieve regularly, then that's insane.  For those of us who feel storing anything site specific in the actual file system is invalid for disaster recovery reasons, database storage is the logical answer.  I can't stand it that I have to back up both the database and some parts of the DNN installation folder on the server.  It's messy and requires 2 different procedures to make sure you get everything.  I should be able to throw a copy of DNN somewhere, restore the database, and we're back.  Mind you, we are a bit unique I think in the DNN world as we use continuous integration to actually do our production deployments for us, so it does pose some difficulty.