Re: Best way to store and retrieve photo from PostGreSQL

[Brent Wood <b.wood@xxxxxxxxxx>]

We are storing images as files with names/paths, metadata, etc. in 
PostGIS (as our images are often associated with a location, being  
things like field specimen images, or seabed pictures we use PostGIS to 
store & query the location info, and UMN Mapserver as the engine driving 
a map based image selection tool - www.atlasmd.com)

Atlas originally used Firebird RDBMS for image data, but was migrated to 
PostGIS to fully support OGC compliant spatial functionality.

The additional step we have implemented to ensure a two way link between 
the images & the data is to write the db primary key to an EXIF field in 
each image as it is uploaded. This means that given an image, we can 
access it's data from the DB, (by looking up the key which is embedded 
in the image) instead of the usual approach which only permits a link 
the other way.

Cheers,

 Brent Wood