Is it a bad design to store images as blobs in a database?

As others have said, you should really only store text in databases - nothing binary. Put the paths to the images in your db, and the images on disk. If you have to worry about scalability, uptime, etc, then look at using a CDN to hold the images, so that they are served from a more robust platform than a single server.

Storing path to image makes your life easier with high performance website

Store them in S3.

Its better when you store the image in a folder and update its path in your MySQL Database. It will decrease your database size and process faster when not requesting the database each time an image is needed to be displayed. You need to take care of the image name you are giving. For example you can append the date & time in the image name to avoid data redundancy.

From maintenance and performance angle would strongly suggest to store path in db. That gives you flexibility to store images on filesystem or on cdn, update images as required (you will need to update URL to manage cache accordingly) using FTP, possible to process them into multiple sizes as required while storing a single path in db  (there are various ways to do this, just listing a possibility in favour of storing path in db), etc.

Following are some reasons why Images should not be stored as BLOBS in database: read/write to a Database is always slower than a file system Your Database backups grow to be huge and more time consuming. It also put Heavy load on the database server. Require additional code to extract and stream the images Web servers, need special coding or processing to access images in the file system

One of the problems with storing files as blobs is that you database will quickly inflate in size. Recently I had a client who had their site set up this way, but needed to upgrade their systems and wanted a new site. Their database was over a gigabyte in size and it was difficult dealing with a database of that size for a plethora of reasons including having trouble taking it down off the server to deploy on my development server.  File systems allow for better organization and will allow for easier transfers in the future should you need to switch servers or software versions.

It is advisable not to store images in database and use urls to link to images stored elsewhere like flickr or the images folders in your website. You can always edit/replace/update your images to be current without meddling with the database. You can also use free images from the internet or your clients website. You can link youtube/vimeo videos, pdf files stored in a cloud. About databases, 10 databases is not a limitation in my view. You can create as many tables as you want in each database. but the total DB storage in MB is what counts for your expense. You have to organize, design and structure your database to suit your needs.

If you store images in DB, you can use a lot of benefit like connections, queries , functions, cached, back up - restore strategies. bla bla ... In other side, you can store huge number of images without scare about your DB,  images size, number, ...you also may choose store in normal file system or distributed file system based on what you need.