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What's the easiest database for images?

I want to add an actual database to https://lookup.design.
The primary use case will be to store and organize about 500 images and give each of them a bunch of tags so I can filter them.

I thought about using an Algolia index (not easy but I am experienced using it) but am a bit hesitant because it already seems too heavy. Ideally, I'm looking for something that I (a frontend developer) can set up in under an hour and that makes uploading data very fast (as I plan on manually adding over 2k images to it over the next few weeks).

Other than an algolia index I also checked out airtable but couldn't really find a good way to organize my images in there.

Curious if any of you have a suggestion!

  1. 2

    ended up going for cloudinary to host the images + firebase to store them. I'm statically prerendering all my pages so I'll barely have any firebase requests and cloudinary scales very far for free.

  2. 2

    Hi Jesco,

    Checkout firebase, it may be a good fit for what you're looking for.

  3. 1

    Assuming only the tags are being searched, the tags can be stored in your database along with a unique ID for the image.

    AWS S3 is a good place to store images. You could also use one of the alternatives that Azure or Google Cloud provides.

    Since you mentioned your focus area is frontend, checkout FileStack. They have an S3 integration too - https://www.filestack.com/docs/concepts/storage/

  4. 1

    Anything that can handle BLOBs should suffice, but depending on the image size, most products usually store the images as files/BLOBs and reference the path in the DB.

  5. 13

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 2

      Yeah, I'd recommend using S3 or more specialised image services like Cloudinary (which provides a lot of other features like compression and smart cropping). Storing the images in your database is often not a good idea.

    2. 1

      This is the way to do it

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