Rat photographs

[Rory-Reid]

Photographs of rats can be useful and they can also be fun. The ability to store a photo against each rat could be useful to illustrate their markings a lot better than a description would.

Kintraks lets users store photos but it has two approaches. Users can store them directly in the database (and it warns this will massively increase filesize) or they can store them relative to the db and have the db store a path to the file. The latter tactic lets the software keep the database file small and use whatever photograph size the user wants, though it makes portability more problematic and such.

Many technical considerations need to be had here since photographs will bloat the database:

• Let users do whatever?
• Automatically resize and compress photos, have a hard and fast limit on them to keep the database bloat to a minimum?
• Have a system for instead including a link to an external resource (maybe similar to kintraks, or an arbitrary path, or urls).

[Rory-Reid]

Idea that I need to think about more and formalise: a second database maintained next to the main one, just for storing BLOBs (the main db can have weak references to it)