>I am storing my images in the memo field in a normal table. Now the size of my FPT file has gone to 1.8 GB already. so this is what is worrying me. I was just thinking of a way out where by I can just store the reference to the particular image file in my table and not store the whole image in the memo field. because now the data is just around 50% and if it goes on like this I might end up with my FPT file to be around 3.5 GB which would be a problem.

If your images aren't compressed (i.e. they're .bmp files), why not compress them before storing? You can use ZLib for that, and simply keep only the image's filename along (if the name changes at all). This way you don't have to wait for long directory searches to find your image, and your memo file should be reasonably shorter. Of course, you'd have to decompress the image before showing it, and delete the file when you don't need it, but if you use the same filename everytime, you don't have to do that, either.