Have you considered using the attachment field and bloating?
Pros and cons for each approach. A picture to a contact record is probably
the typical senerio
Microsoft envisioned for using the attachment field "as is". Not storing
tons and tons of graphics etc...
You get to see a preview of the image (for most formats). I believe they
made it better on the "amount of bloating that occurs".

I don't think you can use the attachment field to hold a link.
You can add/extract attachments via code to move things back and forth from
the filesystem to the database.

HTH
Mark

"Jay Oken" wrote in message
...
I would like to add a picture to a record but do not know the best way to
do it. From what I can see OLE gives the option to "link" to the picture
file rather than imbed the picture in the database which then bloats my
database. The "attachment" type field has a nicer interface when I put it
on a form but bloats the database. Is there a way to use the Attachment
field type but have it be a link to the picture.

Thanks,
J