Android: Saving Image To Database

I have a activity with 3 ImageViews and a Button. Clicking on the ImageView shows an AlertDialog with a list of images (located in /res/drawable) that the user can select. I've hit

Solution 1:

I think the preferred solution is to store the images on the SD card and store the file paths in the database

Solution 2:

An SQLite database supports a NONE type affinity (you can use BLOB in CREATE TABLE statement) which allows you to store binary objects (like an image) inside the database as-is. This is the column type you should assign to the column to store your image in.

Then, when you write your queries, you should parameterize your query, and bind your raw image data into something that can be inserted into the database using whatever API wrapper function supports BLOBs (I assume you have a special one for Android development), and do the same to read the data back. In the SQLite C API, you would use sqlite3_bind_blob(), and sqlite3_result_blob().