Best way to store images

[Daniel Hickman]

Hi

I'm setting up a MySQL database with a MSAccss/VB front end.

The database needs to be able to store 100s of megabytes (if not gigabytes) of JPG images.

My question is, is it a good idea to store these in the data tables as a BLOB type? Can having a very large MySQL database cause problems?

The other option is to keep all the images in a folder structure on the network and store just a reference in the MySQL database. Would this be safer?

Thanks in advance

Dan