Forum Discussion
A Problem with attached images in Access, Windows 10, Office 365
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/access-specifications-0cf3c66f-9cf2-4e32-9568-98c1025bb47c
If you put the pictures on a file system (as you should do for BLOBS > 4 KiB), be aware that NTFS has a soft ca. 10000 files limit per folder. (Hard limit is 4294967295 files per folder, but you can't open the folder in either Explorer or Access.)
Thomas Sowell — 'There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.'
George_Hepworth "Importing data" is a strong word. I was manually typing information directly into the table, and I was not aware there was a 2GB limit on Access files. I would not have started this in Access had I known that. Frankly, it removes the reason to use ACCDB files in preference to MDB files, where you had to do what you suggest.
The trouble with using text fields to point to a network location is that network locations can go down or can move; if the image is contained in the table, everything is self-contained so the database file itself can go anywhere. However, it does point to needing some referential tables (Box X is physically located at Y and uses network path Z for its image files, so you now need a Box table.)
The file size limit for accdbs is the same as mdbs, 2 GB. That's been the same since at least Access 2.0 (it may have been 1GB in the original version of Access.) Over the years, a lot of discussions about that file size limit have all led to the same conclusion: Microsoft is not going to change that limit.
If your organization maintains an unstable network where locations can "go down" or can be moved without notice, that's a different kind of problem. It's not within the scope of this process. I understand that an organization can't guarantee that IT will not take a notion to rearrange the network, but that's probably not going to happen without some advance notice in any responsible organization, I don't think. In other words, that does not strike me as a strong reason to take the even higher probability risk of putting image files inside an accdb.
I agree that if you want to add a reference to the physical locations of the physical media. That's wise anyway.
However, if you really want to store image files in fields in tables, look into using SQL Server Express for the back end. While bloat is still a problem, the maximum size of SSE databases is 10GB and that not only would give you more space, but it would be far less likely to be corrupted.