Keep in mind while its pretty cool to keep images and binary data in a database these solutions may be prone to scalability issues (at the very least, its inefficient).

To store binary data in a database you've got two hits:

1. Reading the data from the database
2. The database reading the data from the disk

The general solution employed is to have a pointer in the database pointing to your file in the filesystem.

Now what you have is a considerable reduction of data in the database which may easy be cached in memory, resulting in a performance increase.

Of course I'm generalising here, there are always exceptions.. :-)