File Size/Speed Optimisation

[wxdqz]

Howdy,Serious question here. I'm about to start development of a large webapp, using a MySQL backend. It will consist of approx. 1 (and up) million records. Each of these records will have a number of relational records, including base data, but also a variable number of images.My question is, is it worthwhile placing these into a well designed database/table structure, or configuring them within the file structure?My specific interests are: - filesize; are images stored with a smaller data size within a table, than sitting on the file tree - speed of access; would it be faster to pull the images from the disk as a file, rather than from a seperate MySQL tableTIA,\\