I am planning to develop a FM 8.5pro solution to deal with a lot of Photos.
My doubt is to let the images stored into the database or have just a link
to them.



It may be 10000 photos 600KB each. Is FM capable of handling such large
files. Will this affects the application performance?



Thanks

Yes, FileMaker is capable of handling a solution of this scope. Files can be
terabytes in size.

This question has been gone over from just about every angle in the past.

Go to groups.google.com and search with "group:comp.databases.filemaker"
after keywords like

graphic
image
embed
reference
container

And you'll get a good overview.

Bottom line:

Embedding Images:
+ usually results in a faster-running solution
+ easier to manage
+ links don't break
- dramatically increases file size
- makes it harder to back up
- can increase risk of or impact of corruption

Recommended: Especially for storing interface elements

Linked images:
+ still work quickly
+ negligible impact on file size
- pictures can move, causing links to break
- complicated to manage broken links

Recommended: Especially for linking to large libraries of images

If you decide to embed your images:

One thing I might do is to store the images in a separate FileMaker file,
physically (not merely a separate table), just to make it easier to back up
the non-image data. You can still relate the two files together easily as
use them as if they were in fact in the same database file. This also
"firewalls" any potential damage that can occur with a corrupted picture
being inserted into your table.




"Hatzigiannakis Nikos" <ypai (AT) aigaio (DOT) gr> wrote