Thanks, but I think I found out what was going on. If I did an inner join between an image table and another table, the image wasn t being returned (or being returned properly...not sure which). As soon as I ran a query against the image table directly, images were returned.

So this did not work: select * from biography_table b inner join image_table i on b.stocknumber = i.stocknumber where b.stocknumber = 12345

But this does: select * from image_table where stocknumber = 12345

This means I have to run 2 separate queries, but at least I m seeing data!!

If you cannot predict what the file type will be, AND/OR you need to use other extensions (such as docx, xlsx, etc), then you can exclusively use FILE for all of your storage and retrieval scripts.

However doing it this way means that FileMaker does not know natively how to handle and open the file. In other words, when using FileMaker you will need to manually export the contents of the field to edit/view it, instead of being able to simply double click the field and it opens the file. So either the setup is advantageous to FileMaker, or advantageous to your external application.

If you do it this way, all files in container fields will be called Untitled.dat and their internal name will be ? , so you will also need to store in another field the actual file name or its extension so you can open it later.

It is because you are using JPG instead of JPEG, in fact, your question answers itself. You can read it this way

SELECT GetAs(Image,  JPEG ) ...

And then, if you are using ado.net read it this way

var bytesLength = reader.GetBytes(0, 0, null, 0, 0);
var buffer = new Byte[bytesLength];
var bytes = reader.GetBytes(0, 0, buffer, 0, (int)bytesLength);
using (var fileStream = new FileStream(String.Format("{0}.jpg", Guid.NewGuid().ToString()), FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write)) {
    fileStream.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
}

Where 0 at the beggining of the the GetBytes function is the index of the photo field.

Buy a license of SuperContainer (shameless plug alert: I m one of the authors) and a Mac Mini to host it on. Move the files out of your container fields and into SuperContainer, and let SuperContainer render image versions of your files by tapping into OS X s CoreImage libs.