Inserting & re-sizing images in Access 2003?

[KevinSlater]

Is it possible in Microsoft Access 2003 to setup the ability to allow users to easily insert there own pictures into a form and also if possible they need to be able to re-size the picture if need be?.

Sometimes up to about 7 pictures may need to be inserted into one form. The idea is a product database that stores details of different products which includes drop down boxes, description fields and the ability for users to insert pictures into the form if possible.

I dont really want to use hyperlinks on the form to the pictures. Is access 2003 suitable for inserting and re-sizing pictures by users? .

Any help/advise on this would be great.

 

[Dennisk]

You may not want to create links to your photos, but when you see the bloat to your db you certainly will. As far as I can acertain Access up to 2003 will only store your photos as BLOBS with no compression, so a 100KB jpeg may generate a 1mb BLOB. I think Access 2007 will store the photos in a compressed form.

 

[KevinSlater]

ok sounds like access 2003 is probably not suitable for handling lots of pictures

 

[Simon_MT]

I used dbpix a paid for ActiveX applet from ammara.com. This does require an investment but it will solve your problem with handling a large number of images.

Pre 2007 Microsoft had a great idea to handle objects as large as elephants OLE for short and dumped bloated bitmap files into tables. The ActiveX applet mentioned you referentially access your images or stores them as blobs in their native formats.

2007 will now store compressed images in their native formats without the bloated footprint. Personally I would never store images within a database as the reads across the data have to hurdle over these image blobs, I have about 100MB of data and 800MB of low-res images. The data would only constitute an eighth of the database and the images would just create an unnecessary overhead.

Simon

 

[KevinSlater]

Ok im trying out the Dbpix software and it seems good overall, however the only issue seems to be it doesnt allow the user to manually change the size of the image, ie by dragging the edge of the image to the required size like in other software. The software allows you to zoom in/zoom out, rotate the image but would like the ability of easily allowing the user to re-size the image as some images that they load may be to small or to big if this is possible?. Ive tried looking through the software help file and on the website but so far cant find a way of doing this, any suggestions?.

 

[Simon_MT]

Even in html and web pages render images are either a prescribed size or it interogates the image and ascertain the aspect from the file. With Access the image is in a container (control) so no matter how big the image the container dictates the image size.

If the image is too small you can resize it as it becomes blocky - pixel stretch. I prefer to manage the images and determine a thumbnail size everyone should use e.g.:

500 max pixel either height or wide
72 dpi
100KB max file size

Image Management is done by a function

Record holds

Image Flag
Image Height
Image Width
Image Size

Form Holds
Image File
Image Height
Image Width
Image Size

Function SetImage()
Dim FullPath As String
        
    With CodeContextObject
        FullPath = GetImageDir & .[Image File]
              
        If Dir([FullPath]) = Empty And .[Image] = -1 Then
            .[Image] = 0
        ElseIf Dir([FullPath]) <> Empty Then
            If .[Image] = 0 Then
               .[Image] = -1
            End If
            If .[Image Width] <> .[ActiveXCtl0].ImageWidth _
            Or .[Image Height] <> .[ActiveXCtl0].ImageHeight Then
                .[Image Width] = .[ActiveXCtl0].ImageWidth
                .[Image Height] = .[ActiveXCtl0].ImageHeight
                .[Image Size] = .[ActiveXCtl0].ImageBytes
            End If
        End If
    End With
End Function

Then there are reports that look at images whose aspect is GT 500 and Size GT 100KB

I know this is not perfect but I have always used Photoshop (PS Elements) for image manipulation.

Simon