Yes, I am going to write a part two of this. I just haven’t had time to do so. We are currently very busy with finishing up our Digital Asset Management "eContentPark". There is the biggest IT Trade Show taking place in Mai here in Switzerland and we are releasing then eContentPark for free to the public.

I do recommend storing images in the database for a couple of reasons. Some of these are:

1. Having them all in the database makes it very easy to manage them. If you are just working with 100 images no problem, but what is if you work with a million images?
2. You just need to backup the database. Also for recovering this is a straight forward process. We have had to move a million images in the past for some customers (which stored everyhting in the filesystem). It took a long time to compress them and the move them and so on. Some information was even lost during the process (IPTC, XMP) because of the OS switch (from Windows to Linux and vice versa). I am not saying that this is the case all the time, but I have seen it in several occassions.
3. Security: Everyone with access to the server can manipulate and get the images, but within a database you can restrict who can do what. You can even go as far as to modify the URL to the images in such a way that one simply can’t get the images without going trough your application (or alike).
4. Some people might say that storing images in the database is a big performance hit. This argument might have been true in the past, but with today’s cheap Ram and Disk Drive prices it is very easy to get a good running server up in no time. I recommend to have a dedicated machine for Oracle alone with at least 6 GB of Ram.
5. When you store images in the file system and someone removes the image, the whole database gets out of sync. Order purchases are messed up, customers complaining and so on. This (should) not happen if you have them in the database.

These are just some thoughts. I am sure there are more pro and cons to storing images in the database. We have developed another digital asset management solution in the past which stored images in the filesystem. Performance was the same as in the database and we have had problems with data being out of sync, security and some other things.

I can only speak of storing images in the Oracle database, because this is the only database I have found which has modules (like Intermedia) especially for images or media in general for that matter.

I hope this helps. If you have any further questions or comments please let me know.