I agree with your "better advice"... Even if it's a public facing app, having them stored in the DB makes it much easier to restore, replicate, etc... Not to me

I agree with your "better advice"... Even if it's a public facing app, having them stored in the DB makes it much easier to restore, replicate, etc... Not to mention allowing fine grained authorization rules. Any time I have worked on a system (web app, fat-client, etc) where images, which are really data, are separate from the image metadata, overtime, a colossal mess occurs. Orphaned files without metadata, metadata without files. Even in your public web app, you also might have other back-end systems that cannot access S3, but can access your application services or DB (yikes). There are definitely many cases where external providers like S3 is the better approach, but not all. Also, you don't have a performance problem until you have a performance problem.