Image help?

[ndynamo]

Hello! I'm new here (and new to Access) so go easy on me?

I've been assigned to handle a project relating to historic buildings in the area. Each building has several fields worth of text data (address, owner name, year built, etc.) as well as a picture of the building. Ideally, I'd like to end up with a printable report that displays the data for each building along with its picture.



Originally, I was working in Access 2007 and I just included all the pictures in an attachment field, because that seemed like the simplest solution. However, around the time that we moved to Office 2010, the project was expanded and I now have several hundred buildings to work with. The pictures are large files and much too unwieldy to use as attachments in large numbers. All of the pictures are in a folder with the database, and I'd like to be able to just hyperlink to that folder and have the pictures appear in the report. But when I use Access' image control, it displays the same image with each record. I changed the control source to the appropriate field containing the link to the picture - I tried both a hyperlink field and a regular text field. Neither worked, it still displayed the same image for each record.

I have tried DBPix, but I would strongly prefer not to have to pay for a license, and as this is a database that will be shared with a client, needing DBPix installed is not optimal. Likewise, I have had OLEs suggested to me, but I have only heard bad things about using OLEs so I am hesitant.

Any help or advice would be wonderful, thanks!

[NTC]

well, it is situational. your first approach - Attachments - remains very viable. The value to this is that it keeps the big image file size out of the db, plus it launches the best native app associated with the file type; pdf, txt, jpg, etc. even now mpg.... And so it works great when there is a wide variety of images that go with a record. And also when in fact the human only looks at an image on occasion. depending on the situation some effort is needed to organize the attachments so they are easily useable from the form - but that is manageable.

but the vanilla image feature in a form works ok for when you have a single, relatively modest file sized uniform image type with a record and in single form mode. for instance the employee's snap shot photo. in my opinion.

an image is static - think jpg: while pdf, Word, Excel is not an image - it is an application.

So in sum; when complex I use attachments, when simple & uniform I use the generic image control in form. And overall one shouldn't confuse images with nesting other applications like Adobe or Excel. Given these parameters one generally can get what one needs.

Hope this helps.