Handling BLOB image Upload and Displaying BLOB image using php, html

dheerajkumar · April 17

If you dont want to upload image directly to your server or handling same database with different FTP Connections you can use concept of BLOB image , through which we directly upload image into our database.

Step1: Create a column in your database of type TINYBLOB/ BLOB/ MEDIUMBLOB/ LONGBLOB based on your image size requirement

ALTER TABLE table_name ADD image LONGBLOB, ADD image_type varchar(255);

Step2: Create HTML form from where we can upload our image

<form action='' id='form_id' method='POST' enctype="multipart/form-data">
    <input type="file" name="images" required>
</form>
<button type="submit" form="form_id">Submit</button>

Step3: Now we have to handle the image upload through php as

if(isset($_FILES["images"]["name"]) && $_FILES["images"]["name"] <> ''){ 
  $image = $_FILES['images']['tmp_name'];
  $image_data = file_get_contents($image);
  $image_type = $_FILES['images']['type'];    
}
$imageData = base64_encode($imageData); //encoding in base64 to avoid syntax errors in sql query


$query = "INSERT INTO table_name (image, image_type) VALUES ('$image_data', '$image_type')";
mysqli_query($db, $query);

Step4: Now saving Blob image to database is done, Now we have to show this image in our view page

$sql = "SELECT image,image_type FROM table_name WHERE id='1' ";
$result = $db->query($sql);
$row = $result->fetch_assoc();
$image = $row['image'];
$image_type = $row['image_type'];
//based on image type replace your code with this following
<img src="data:image/jpeg;base64,<?php echo $image; ?>">
<img src="data:image/png;base64,<?php echo $image; ?>">

By following these simple steps we can use Blob Images