On my site (blatent self-promotion) I basically do exactly what was previously described and it has been working great for years. The image information in the database includes an unlimited number of keywords per image so that images can appear in any gallery that they seem to fit in. I generally only store very small images as BLOB (like link buttons, only a few kilobytes), so these images are stored on the filesystem. The database also makes it very easy to store the viewing statistics for each image so I can make neat tables like this. Let me know if you want any more info. :-)