You wrote: > I wonder if this is one of those religious war > things, possibly? Well, possibly--but if so, I'm not one of the participants, I don't think. It's really just a personal preference rather than a religious thing. :)

The big reason I'd rather store binary content in the filesystem is that the facilities for dealing with BLOBs are very ugly in certain databases. (Admittedly, this isn't really the case in MySQL.) But still, I just like keeping the data separate, because when inserting/updating/selecting records, I think it keeps things simpler.

But there are probably reasons both way, and your points are well taken.