>I'm allowing the user to select any picture. I size them to 40x40, but the original size is open to whatever he selects. Their could be a couple thousand images.

I handle 6000 images from conferences here on this site. You can get them all from the Photos option on the top main page menu. That represents over a GB of disk space. I find it is much better to establish a primary key relationship to handle that on disk. Then, I can do whatever I want with it. For examples, those 6000 images had a one pixel black border in them. That was the case until 48 hours ago. I took me about a minute to remove all those borders from the images as this is now handled by the stylesheet and I now have a better control on displaying them. I wouldn't have been able to handle such a change if there would have been in the database.

Also, for a couple of thousand images, I would certainly not suggest to store them in the table. Especially, if you would allow the original version to be as their choice. You could end up with the database being several times bigger just for that support.