building web album - design questions

Hi, I'm planning to build a web album for my digital photographs, and have some questions regarding the design: 1) Is it better to store the images within the database, or just store pointers to the images which is put outside, in the filesystem? 2) At log in, I want to show to which albums new pictures have been added since last visit. For performance reasons, should information about last added pictures be added to the database, or is it ok to make a MySQL-query each time, comparing the add-date for every picture in every album with the users last log in date? 3) If I've understood things right, there is functions within PHP that can handle picture resizing? Is that correct? Best regards, Anders Thoresson