Comments on: When you should use base64 for images

By: Patrick

Patrick — Sun, 29 Mar 2015 22:07:20 +0000

Great article!
Online tool for base64 image encoding & decoding
http://freeonlinetools24.com/base64-image

By: Jack Spratt

Jack Spratt — Thu, 08 Jan 2015 16:23:15 +0000

Be very carefull with Base64. I convertred an image of 568 KB to Base64 and it resulted in an string that was 84 Pages long when I put the string in my word processor since my text editor coolapsed under that kind of weight! I just do noit see the benefit. If a test editor can’t hadle thast much, how slow will my page load with that much weight?! Not for me!

By: Stoimen

Stoimen — Mon, 19 May 2014 14:33:21 +0000

Images can be saved in database even without being converted to base64.

By: Jing

Jing — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 19:11:30 +0000

I think the most benefit of base64 is you can save the image data into the database. You don’t have to find physical space to store images on the server.

By: Php Exp

Php Exp — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 14:50:35 +0000

I recommend a web application where you can convert Image to Base64 string easily.

By: Seth

Seth — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 20:42:06 +0000

Your use of contractions throughout this article makes it an absolutely terrible read..

By: Selvol

Selvol — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 06:32:05 +0000

Was going to just state file_get_contents() can do get remote images.
Now I’ll just second what “cereal” already stated,,,,,,

Selvol

By: Stoimen

Stoimen — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 08:17:53 +0000

Hi Dror,

yes, no matter what’s your storage (db or filesystem), representing the images as base64 strings in memcache can dramatically improve the speed of fetching them by the application. But memcache is only a caching layer and if you have lots of images you’ve to store them somewhere – you can just push them all in the memcache (if there are too much).

By: Dror

Dror — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 08:13:59 +0000

Hi Stoimen,
I thought that when I’m having a dense calls to the db , memcache could help in not going all the way to the db level but fetching the information from memory , so if I store images as base64 at db and using memcache , I would practically wont go to db but read the binary and serve it very fast … is that so ?

By: Stoimen

Stoimen — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 08:08:04 +0000

Hi Dror,

what do you mean by “reading them directly”? Reading from the DB and the filesystem is practically the same approach, but sometimes reading from the DB is faster. Memcache is only a way you can cache filesystem items in memory, so it doesn’t matter which DB/Filesystem you chose. However note that base64 is slightly more heavyier than appropriate image format.