Hi,

I have a solution built on a two-file separation model where the user wants to store the images as non-referenced images inside the FMP 9 data file. There will be thousands, then tens of thousands of these images, over time. They're not high-res but will average around 100-300k a piece.

My question - which I'm sure has been asked before but which I can't find, sorry - is, will this slow down, make unstable or have any other negative effect on the database?

Anyone got any experience of this? The solution will be initially hosted on FMP 9 client for testing then will move to Server 9 very soon, so it's really for Server.

Thanks,

Pat

I dont think it should impact speed as much as it just bloating the size of the file. If you have calcs based that reference that container field perhaps it may effect is slightly but I dont think it would be anything significant.

Thanks John - good to know.

Another "heads up" too...

I made a solution exactly like you describe, mostly because I could support it better. What I didn't plan for was the photos which were imported were taken on a 5 Megapix camera at full resolution!

As a consequence it rendered the e-mail functions useless as they were sending a PDF image. They came out around 30Mb per page!!!

So even though your images are 100-300k, watch out for the "PDF bloat".

Bear in mind also you cannot export container fields.

you cannot export container fields.

I am not sure I agree with that statement.

Perhaps it should have been more clearly stated as to something like: when exporting fields as a csv, mer, txt, tab, etc format, container fields will not export. :)

So if you need to get the data back out of a container field as a file on disk, do you use a script instead of export?

You can use Export Field Contents… to retrieve the file in ONE record at a time - otherwise you'd want to script it. See for example:

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/179603/

If you must store the images in FileMaker, I'd make a separate file dedicated to that, it might make it easier later to do backups or recover from a crash.

You should also at least be aware of another option: SuperContainer.

Thanks for this! Very useful