MIME-Based Transformations - Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.8 for Effective MySQL Management - page 226

The MIME Column's Settings
If we go to the Table view of the Structure page for the books table and click the
Change link for the cover_photo , we see three additional attributes for the fields:

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MIME type
Browser transformation
Transformation options

For a specific field, it is possible to indicate only one type of transformation. Here,
the field is a BLOB field, so it can hold any kind of data, but for phpMyAdmin to
interpret and act correctly on the data, the transformation system must be informed
of the data format and the intended results. Accordingly, we have to ensure that we
upload data that always follows the same file format.

We will first learn the purpose of those attributes, and then try some possibilities in
the Examples of Transformation section.

MIME Types
The MIME specification has been chosen as a metadata attribute to categorize the
kind of data a column holds. The current possible values are:

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image / jpeg
image / png
text / plain
application / octetstream

The auto-detect option in the menu is yet to be implemented, so we do not use it.

The text/plain type can be chosen for a column containing any kind of text (for
example, XHTML or XML text).

Browser Transformations
This is where we set the exact transformation to be done. More than one
transformation may be supported per MIME type. For example, for the image/jpeg
MIME type, we have two transformations available: image/jpeg: inline for a
clickable thumbnail of the image, and image/jpeg: link to display just a link.