Greetings Cristoph, There are ways around it, but the typical problem with storing images in a database is the caching. An image must be read from the dbase to temp storage and then to the client. This prevents immediate caching and increases load across the dbms. What I prefer to do is store a single word in a record like the country flag name. Then in your dtml, the record pulls only a piece of text that is part of the url to the image. For instance: <dtml-in whateverMethod> <dtml-var data> <img src="http://yourserver.com/Images/Flags/&dttml-countryname;.gif"> </dtml-in> This allows for dynamic flag calls and allows the client to cache (if you use the caching mechanism or other technique) So basically, you can modify the typical country-table that will access a file by the 2-char country code (dont use 2, its outdated). Leaves you only to decide where to place the IT.gif, NL.gif, DE.gif and so on..... Success, Paz -----Original Message----- From: zope-admin@zope.org [mailto:zope-admin@zope.org]On Behalf Of Christoph Schirmer Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2001 8:43 AM To: zope@zope.org Subject: [Zope] Images and database I am using a mysql database. Actually the sql queries with zsql are by far the easiest part in learning Zope :-) Anyway, I have the following problem. Some of the data also need to be associated with pictures. E.g. for countries, there are flags. Where should one at best store the flags? I thought it could be better to store them within Zope, so that they files can be used easily outside the database as well. In the site root I created a folder images, and as id I used the short tag of the country (e.g. ITA for Italy), which can be found in the field cou_tag. The method looks like this: <tr><th>Country-ID</th><th>Tag</th><th>Country</th><th><a href="listbycontinent">Continent</th><th> ></tr> <dtml-in countries> <tr><td><dtml-var cou_id></td><td><dtml-var cou_tag></td><td><dtml-var cou_name></td><td><dtml-var con_name></td><td><img src="&dtml-portal_url;/images/<dtml-var cou_tag>" ALT="<dtml-var cou_name>" align="absmiddle"></td></tr> </dtml-in> </table> It is probably rude, but I am a newbie :-). And it works, basically, but it is awfully slow, because for each entry it searches the images folder for a file. Is there a way to make this more elegant, and faster? Thanks for your help, Christoph