Is this really a good idea though? I thought it was generally preferred practice to store large binary files outside of the database. Otherwise the database file will end up growing pretty quickly.

That's your call. If you're going to be storing 100gb of images then put them somewhere else, but this post is about using SQLite as a file format so storing binary files inside is not a problem.

Counterpoint: tiled maps, which are basically loads and loads of images, can be stored on disk as

- Direcory structure

- Zip file

- Tar file

- Sqlite db

Out of these, sqlite is the most compact, by far (also the fastest)

We just transitioned our tiled images from using a directory structure to SQLite.

Having a single file per very large image (for mobile) makes transferring them to the phone over USB around ten times as fast. I wish I’d done it years ago.

Creating huge files is usually a bad idea. It does not matter if they are a sequence of lines of characters, a gziped collecion of XML data, a binary format that requires 6000 pages of documentation, or a SQLite database.

If you can spread your data among many files, you probably should. Not everybody can.

Storing large objects in database rows impacts performance and scalability but this shouldn't be a problem unless your files are extraordinarily large.