I have a product table with about 4000 records, size about 2.2MB. Last week the FTP file size for this table was only 787KB (mainly memo text).

Then this week I added a general field to my table, and through OLE linking I added about 300 x BMP line drawings to the file.

Yesterday I was shocked to see that my FTP file had grown to 435MB!!! I was able to reduce this size down to about 202MB by using the PACK MEMO command.

Firstly, I have never worked with general fields before, or with OLE. I had thought that linking would be better than embedding, because it sounded like only the link would be stored in my table and not the actual images. But it appears that both choices seem embed the images into the general field.

I read recently in the “Hackers Guide to VFP 6.0” on pg. 19 that VFP uses ‘display’ data in raw BMP which is stored in the general field. This space is used even if the data is only linked to the field. (I know that my folder that contains my 300 BMP files is only 125MB, but my FPT file is 202MB!)

The book suggests "considering other techniques (such as just storing the path and filenames in a character field, and using a cursor to hold one image at a time) "

Can anyone give me an example of how this can be done?

Are there any other alternatives?

Thanks and regards,