>>Now, apart from the memo bloat (reported by many other programmers, contradicted by your experiments), there is the other problem, that it is difficult to get pictures out of the general field.
>>
>>For those two reasons, most programmers here on the UT recommend using separate JPG-files (or GIF, or whatever).
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>Hilmar,
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>My "experiments" do not contradict the memo bloat issue. Memo bloat only happens if you replace memo field contents with new data. I am not doing that. If you store a JPG or other file in a general field there is no bloat problem unless you replace the image again and again.
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>Secondly, if you want to store images or other files in a VFP DBF then just use a binary memo field and not a general field and then its easy to get the file out again using COPY MEMO command.
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>General fields are not for storing files in but storing OLE objects in.
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>Besides, none of this has any further relevance to the original posting.
>
>Jos

Hmmm... I confused APPEND GENERAL with APPEND MEMO. That was the source of the apparent contradiction. Sorry.

I still don't recommend saving into general fields. Saving into a memo field is a quite different issue. One more point: if you paste large files into memo fields, your FPT file may grow beyond the 2 GB limit. This problem won't appear (not as quickly) if you keep separate files. However, this will only cause problems if you have really large amounts of data.

Hilmar.