PHP form, Image upload. Store in MySQL database. Retrieve

I'm often asked if MySQL can be used to store images - in other words as an image library. Yes, it can; you'll store the data using a "blob" type (longblob if the image might exceed 64k) and you need to ensure that the four characters " ' \ and null are encoded to that they don't cause the SQL statements any problems. Once you're aware of that, it shouldn't be any great problem. [[[And note - these techniques equally apply to .pdf document files and other binary data such as Word files ....]]]

When you come to "fronting" the database with PHP, it gets slightly more complex - you need to use an unusual encoding type in your form, and be very careful to get your file permissions, addslashes, stripslashes and htmlspecialschars all correct.

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Here's a sample script that provide for image upload (maximum image size 145k, .jpg images only please) as a demonstration. It will only show you the most recent image even though lots are stored on the database.