How do I put pictures in Microsoft Access?

Factual Questions
#1

mods: If this isn’t a “general question”, thanks in advance for putting it wherever it belongs.

I am setting up a Microsoft Access database at work. This database will act as a dispatch center. The dispatcher is to enter incidents, officers sent, time/date, etc of all of the calls we respond to (private security).

We have a list of individuals who are banned from the property. I would like to set it up so we can easily flip through their information and mug shots. Ideally, this is so if we see someone we recognize as banned, we can scroll through all of the picture entries until we get a match, and his/her information will be displayed. However, I’m having trouble figuring out how to do this in Access. I can set up their information boxes just fine, but when it comes to linking a picture to each entry I don’t even know where to begin.

Is this even possible in Access? If not, what’s going to be my best/easiest option to get something of this type to work? Thanks in advance.

#2

Never thought of doing this but it seems like a good idea!

Here’s an article right from the MS Office site about how to accomplish this. The article says it’s for “Access 2003” but I would assume it would work for one previous and all following versions.

Here’s a tutorial for adding pictures to a report…and a similar method for adding them to forms. These particular examples were for versions 97 and 2000.

Good luck!

#3

I have not read the two articles linked above, but allow me to mention, that as a Database Administrator, I would strongly discourage you from putting the pictures directly into the database engine itself. Most database engines are primarily optimized for handling data, not large binary objects (such as images, or PDF documents).

What we recommend is you include a piece of data that contains the path to the desired image, and have your VB code look up the path and display the image. Pictures tend to degrade the performance of a database pretty severely.

#4

I got it to work using linking in VB code on one of the websites mentioned. Thanks for the help.

Now, if only I could figure out how to set up a “browse” button to open a file manager since I’m pretty sure most users would have trouble remembering/typing in the file name/path for each entry. Any takers?

#5

I have used the API function “GetOpenFileNameA” to allow the user to pick a file. Here is a site that tells you how.