Hi!

This is my first time in the database forum
On my website there will be a list of news of what has happened recently. News will be stored in a database (using PHP/MySQL) and only the most recent ones will be shown. So far piece a cake.

Now, heres the problem. Every news will aslo be able to hold a number of images (0-5). Images will be stored in a database table of their own. How would I best store this in the database, since I won't know how many images each news got? I should probably store the images id's with each news, but I won't know how many there are.

And just to clarify, the problem isn't storing the images in my database, but how to link the news to their associated images.

Thanks
lizciz

I use a seperate table for images and store the ID of the item and the path to the image in each row.

I do too. I believe you didn't read my post very carefully. The problem I'm having is not how to store images in my database, but how to link the images to the news they belong to.

Edit:
Hmm, now that I read my own post, where I wrote "link the images to the news" instead of "link the news to their associated images" I realised I can simply add an attibute 'newsID' to each image that tells which news this image belong to

Yep.

and I've just noticed my post should have read;

store the ID of the newsitem and ...

each row for each image. (many rows for one news )

Hmmm I would do it like this (but I could be VERY wrong! hehe)

[newsitems table]
uid
title
description
etc..

[images table]
uid
caption
imagefile
etc...

[linkup table]
uid
newsid
imageid

Each row in the linkup table has a newsid (corresponding to a uid in the news items table) and an imageid (corresponding to an uid in the images table).

That way you can have as many images linked to as many news items as you wish.

You can also re-use images in different news items simply by creating more links.