Picture with Postgres and Delphi

Hi !! Everybody
I am developing app using Delphi and I have a question:
I have to save pictures into my database. Each picture has 20 o 30k aprox.
What is the way more optimus?
That 's table will have 500000 records around. Somebody said the best way to
do that was encoder the picture to field bytea but I dont know about this.
Another way is save the path to the picture file but I dont like so much
because I need to write to disk by OS and have permission to write a
directory to OS.
What do u think??
Edwin Quijada