>I am using an ole control to display a picture from a general field. BMP files will display but will cost us too much storage space.
A general field costs too much space, too. And, it is difficult to extract, back to a JPG file (or whatever you stored in the general field). Better keep the file as a separate JPG-file. In the table, put a small character field with the filename.
For example, in an experiment I did, a JPG file cost about 50 KB; importing the same JPG file into a general made the filesize increase by more than 1 MB. That is a 1:20 ratio.
Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire... (from Gulliver's Travels)