Store user profile pictures on disk or in the database?

Question

I\'m building an asp.net mvc application where users can attach a picture to their profile, but also in other areas of the system like a messaging gadget on the dashboard that d

Answer 1

Store references to the files on a database and store the files themselves on disk.

This approach is way more flexible and easier to scale.

You can have a single database and several servers serving static content. It will be much trickier to have several databases doing that work.

Flickr works this way.

Hope it helps.