Well for basic storing and retreiving I found this yesterday and it really helped me get my dumb head around it!
http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/ddws/
Not sure that much would be different no matter what the data type is, but maybe you will need to set up some height and width variables for displaying the images etc.
My only need now is how to get the results of a
"Select * from tableA"
into a nicely formatted table with headings taken from the db. There is about 45 columns in this table so dont fancy the ugly HTML formatting longhand, i remember seeing a tutorial once that walked through taking $results and putting that into an array and formatting it using sort of half open table tags like <tr