How to Insert Commas & Quotes in MySQL. Special characters require the MySQL escape character to indicate to the server that you want to insert the characters without executing any secondary code.

The test image I am using is only ~150k, so I don't think the problem is with size. Also, I print out the value immediately before I insert it into the DB and it gives the expected binary garbage.

References W3Schools: PHP MySQL Insert Into Learn to submit HTML data to MySQL database using php ...

Jack Wallen explains how to add data into a MySQL table from the command line.