Some code would certainly help, as well as your choice of platform. This is a common type of problem, but the causes vary wildly. Trying to diagnose a code problem without source code is like trying to fix a car when it's at home and you're at the garage telling the mechainic about a funny noise you heard coming from the engine.

How you are inserting and retrieving the images is of particular interest. If you could post your INSERT statement, with associated DBI code, it would probably be very clear what your problem is. Also, how are you loading the file? Is it loading completely? You suggest that load_file works, and that is something internal to MySQL, so it could be that you are not reading the entire file.