Photo Help

[DavidSt]

I will keep this short. I have read the various posts on how access is no
too good at storing photos. I have a valid reason for doing so but someone
PLEASE explain why....I have created a shell database that does nothing but
store photos. I then link that photo table to my main database.

I have only 10 photos imported so far in a jpeg format. Outside of Access
these photos total about 4 MB. Once imported into Access, these 10 photos
have bloated the database to 116 MB. Is Access THAT HORRIBLE in storing
photos?

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

The short answer is yes.

The sample imaging databases at http://accdevel.tripod.com illustrate three
approaches to handling images in Access, and the download includes an
article discussing considerations in choosing an approach. Two of the
approaches do not use OLE Objects and, thus, avoid the database bloat, and
some other problems, associated with images in OLE Objects.

If you are printing the images in reports, to avoid memory leakage, you
should also see MVP Stephen Lebans' http://www.lebans.com/printfailures.htm.
PrintFailure.zip is an Access97 MDB containing a report that fails during
the Access formatting process prior to being spooled to the Printer Driver.
This MDB also contains code showing how to convert the contents of the Image
control to a Bitmap file prior to printing. This helps alleviate the "Out of
Memory" error that can popup when printing image intensive reports.

If you've already starting storing images in your database, and you'd like
to export them all, see: http://www.lebans.com/oletodisk.htm

 

[bob]

This problem is caused by using a specific technique - 'OLE Embedding' ('OLE Linking' also suffers the
problem). The reason for the overhead is that an uncompressed bitmap is stored in the field, so for JPEG
images this is typically anything from 20 to 200 *times* the size of the original file.

Of course, the 'OLE Object' field is just a binary field, so it is perfectly capable of storing any binary
data without this overhead (and associated problems), but doing so typically requires quite a bit of coding
or third party components.

More detail on problems with OLE Embedding is available here:
http://www.ammara.com/articles/accesspictureole.html

And a detailed comparison of the storage overhead of various techniques is available here:
http://www.ammara.com/articles/imagesaccess.html

 

[Arvin Meyer [MVP]]

In addition to the other replies, there are some activex controls which are
capable of storing photos more efficiently. One I've successfully tried is
DBPix:

http://www.ammara.com/

Nothing is as efficient as storing the images outside the database.
--
Arvin Meyer, MCP, MVP
Microsoft Access
Free Access downloads:
http://www.datastrat.com
http://www.mvps.org/access