Hey Michael,

Thanks for the input. We moved the clients away from storing the images in a memo field to keeping them in an images directory and storing the image's date/time stamp in the table to ensure they had not been tampered with.

We are only going to use the memo fields when moving an image from one physical site to another...that way we just have to move a table.

Thanks again for the input!

>Hi Ken,
>>
>>My concers about putting them in a memo field are:
>>
>>1. The unstable nature of a memo field, especially with the size this sucker would grow to.
>
>A valid concern, I stay away from memo fields like the plague especially when data is mission critical and restoring from backups due to crash is not desirable.
>
>>2. The images will be pulled out for editing (typically brightness and contrast) and put back in...resulting in .FPT bloat and required PACK MEMO.
>
>If you are going to try to maintain an image database of any size then bloat and the 2 gig limit may well be issues. I would not recommend Foxpro's memo field for this purpose. I guess its possible to deal with these issues. If you were diehard to use VFP tables you could even store an image into a character field by splitting it up into 255 character chunks across multiple records. So much for the memo field and it's associated problems.
>
>>I tried putting the image in a general field, but couldn't get it back out...I was using APPEND GENERAL for the in and COPY FIELD for the out. The file I got on the out was not recognized as a valid image file.
>
>I think what you got out was the embedded OLE object you stored, just a guess. I have not worked much with the general field. Maybe a knowledgeable UT'er will chime in here.
>
>>Any suggestions would be totally appreciated.
>
>Well first off, I'm no expert and I've only done limited work with image databases (most of which was research). I would consider the maximum number of images to maintain to see if storing as individual files is feasible. This is probably the simplest approach. Once you start looking at thousands of images I would have a problem storing them as individual files. If you are talking about maintaining a large image database (image size and number of images) then you should consider client/server.
>
>HTH,
>Mike