There are pros and cons to each approach. I use both in Inventory Express. If your picture is held in a binary field in the database, the BLOB file that holds the binaries will quickly grow huge if the picture is large, or the compression is lossless. In IE, I only use this method to hold relatively small thumbnails in a lossy compression. On the good side, this method requires no coding. The pic is just there.
To store users' larger, high-res pictures in IE, I save the pictures in an external folder and link them with field in the database that contains the path and filename to the picture. The advantage is that it doesn't bloat the database, and file corruption won't lose all the pictures at once. The disadvantage is that you have to do some coding to make the interface load and display each picture from an external file every time you move to a new record. I don't know Access nearly well enough to suggest code to make this happen, but it would likely involve defining a new source for the image control on your form every time you move to a new record in the table.
Maybe that will at least point you in the right direction. You can generally find Access sample code online for a given function if you search around a bit.
Best,
J
