Can I add photos to a large database?

[Guest]

I want to use access to creat a DB for my church. It is necessary to embed a
photo as the plan is to print directories of the membership. I recently read
where MS is limiting OLE in access 2003 and may be moving away from including
it in future releases of Office.

 

[Douglas J. Steele]

The sample imaging databases at http://accdevel.tripod.com illustrate three
approaches to handling images in Access, and the download includes an
article discussing considerations in choosing an approach. Two of the
approaches do not use OLE Objects and, thus, avoid the database bloat,
andsome other problems, associated with images in OLE Objects.

If you are printing the images in reports, to avoid memory leakage, you
should also see MVP Stephen Lebans' http://www.lebans.com/printfailures.htm.
PrintFailure.zip is an Access97 MDB containing a report that fails during
the Access formatting process prior to being spooled to the Printer Driver.
This MDB also contains code showing how to convert the contents of the Image
control to a Bitmap file prior to printing. This helps alleviate the "Out of
Memory" error that can popup when printing image intensive reports.

If you've already starting storing images in your database, and you'd like
to export them all, see:
http://www.lebans.com/oletodisk.htm

 

[Larry Linson]

. . . It is necessary to embed a photo as the plan
is to print directories of the membership.

It is not necessary to _embed_ photos in order to print them.

See Doug Steele's response.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP

 

[Martureo Bob]

I'm the author of an Access-based Church Management package that currently
handles photos for directories --- but the photos themselves are all kept
external to Access (in regular Windows folders). I tried OLE (for a very
brief couple of hours and then backed out of it). I've found that so long
as you are reasonable about the size of the photos (I limit mine to 64kb per
image) the printing is workable. This is because the photo must be imported
at print time.

The interface that handles this seems to be ticklish regarding memory. My
software is spec'd for Win 98 and later, so I need to be very careful with
memory issues.

To get the photo to print, defining an unbouond image box control in the
report. In the OnPrint event (printcount = 1 only) set the path to the
photo in the image box control. The path would need to be retained in your
Name and Address database.

If you want an example of how it looks from a user's perspective, please
email me. The package is publicly available and downloadable for free.

Bob.