Importing attachments from Access database

[EarthCareTech]

Hi all, and thanks in advance.

A bizarre set of circumstances led me to create a database in Access, only to find that the organisation I’m working with doesn’t use Access, and the main person I need to share it with uses LibreOffice (which I would have preferred to use in the first place).

I’m now stuck with trying to import the data. I can import the tables OK, but it’s a database of plants, and there are photos with most of the records: over 1,000 in all. In Access, they’re attachments, but my recollection of LO Base is images are inserted as BLOBs. In any event, it seems like the links have come over as unlinked filenames.

Is there a way to import them properly into Base?

[RobertG]

Don’t take a BLOB field for images. Use a VARCHAR field and add the images in separate folder. The field should only contain the path to this fields. In a form you could connect an image control for this fields.

[Wanderer]

@EarthCareTech

In any event, it seems like the links have come over as unlinked filenames.

From this I read: You have all filenames (including path ?) in your database in LibreOffice now. And you have the pictures not inside the database, but in a separate folder on your disk.
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Then all you need to do is using an ImageControl in your form and set the field with the pathname as source for the Control. Same as you would do for a text-field.
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So the database has no clue about the images, but the form has the information to load this image from disk using the path, when it is needed.
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And as Robert already pointed out: It is usually not recommended to store pictures inside databases - especially not the embedded ones like the default hsql-embedded.

[Villeroy]

Sample database: PicsDB storing only the file names of pictures in same directory.
In fact there are 3 sample databases in that zip: embedded HSQL, embedded Firebird and a third database with a spreadsheet as data source.