storing image

hi,

any ideas on how images are stored in social websites like facebook/myspace. Its not stored in filesystem i believe. What would be the best approach to store images if have to develop a website like facebook application using j2ee .

i have stored images in db and displayed in on JSP using servlets for my current project . Is it a good approach if there are millions of users uploading images ?
I'm just curious :-)

thanks,
Rajeev

Anytime I have stored images for use for applications of mine I have stored them as blobs in an oracle database. That way you can use additional attributes in the table for indexing.

i agree with that DB approach but if there are millions of images, is it the right way to do it ? i was wondering if there is anything much better which im not ever aware of.

thanks,

face book uses a system called Haystack.
read Inside Facebook’s Photo Factory
or this from facebook

I've only ever used file system storage, meaning the relevant DB record contains all the information needed to access the image file on a file server.

You'd need to think about how to handle synchronization in the case where more than one person has write access to an image (not likely in the Facebook example, but often the case in image-handling applications).

we use a netApp server to store images and access them using HTTP to display on the screen.
The paths are stored in a DB

This has nothing to do with PD. Moving to General Computing

Eric

thank you all for the replies !! its really informative..
no, there is no need for synchronization, no 2 people will be editing an image at same time. I was just curious to know about the image storing approach used by various websites which has millions of unique daily users.

Aniruddh, thanks for the facebook link.

- raj

You can use content server, set workflow, etc....

You could store your images in a third-party storage like Amazon S3.

The advantage here is that the storage is quite cheap, and your main web-site is not hit with image requests, instead it goes to a third-party.

Infact a lot of social networking sites, like many have pointed out do store images separately.
The largest number of images is with facebook!

Check this one Facebook approach