1. don't populate your database with images, just use varchar fields to store the image names (and paths if you want).
2. you can use dataassist to build your maintenance pages, there is a wizard to create the pages you need
3. if you have a lot of images, you can populate your image and thumbnail fields with the image name (and path ?) and ftp the image files to the appropriate folder. This will be quicker than using the maintenance pages