Flutter Save Images as String in SQLite Database

Flutter Knowledge Sharing #59

Welcome to my next Flutter article about image saving in SQLite DB as a String. There have many ways to pick an image from the gallery and save it in your application for further use. Here I show you how we can encode an image as a String and decode it. Also, I want to say that this is a common use case in mobile applications. Let’s see how we can do it using the Flutter app development framework. Here I plan to show you how to pick an image from the gallery and save it in the SQLite Database as a string after encoding it, and finally, how to decode it and show it in a list view. Here the most useful parts are how to encode the image to a String and How to decode it into an image. Here we go !!!

Adding Dependencies

First, you must add the following dependencies to your pubspec.yaml.

sqflite: ^2.0.3
path_provider: ^2.0.11
async:io: ^1.0.3
shared_preferences: ^2.0.15
image_picker: ^0.8.5+3

Creating the Model

Create the model class called photo, which is used to upload and retrieve an image.

class photo {
    late int? id = 0;
    late String? photoName = "";
    photo(int i, String imgString){
        this.photoName = imgString;
    }
    Map <String, dynamic> toMap(){
        var map = <String, dynamic>{
                'id': id,
                'photoName': photoName,
};
        return map;
    }
photo.fromMap(Map<String, dynamic>map){
        id = map['id'];
        photoName = map ['photoName'];
    }
}

Creating the Database Helper Class

Here I am trying to save the image in SQLite DB. So we need to create a database helper class. Here include all the methods for saving and fetching the details from SQLite DB.

import 'dart:async';
import 'dart:io';
import 'package:path/path.dart';
import 'package:sqflite/sqflite.dart';
import 'package:path_provider/path_provider.dart';
import 'package:flutter_application_image/model/photo.dart';
class DBHelper{
    static Database? _db;
    static const String ID ='id';
    static const String NAME = 'photoName';
    static const String TABLE = 'photosTable';
    static const String…