Richard has covered this in multiple TechHelp videos:

Hyperlinks
Images Subfolder
Images


and others.

Roster has indeed covered gathering drive letter and path which is where I got the idea. However, it seems like all drive letters and paths should be concentrated in one form so that if the back end location changes, or the pictures changes, or PDFs, then in one place all  letters and paths can be controlled. The form with images pulls from the Pathing tab on the Manage form. Same for the Backup tab which gets its FromDirectory and ToDirectory from the Pathing tab. One benefit is stopping the use of unacceptable drive letters or directories.

Windows uses environmental variables to store commonly used paths.  The same strategy could be used to store paths in Access tables.

For instance, Windows uses %userprofile% to stand for the path of your user folder:

     %userprofile%\Documents\Myfile.accdb

In my tables, I use a similar method to store certain paths that could potentially be changed:

     EV_MYFOLDER\MyPics\img1000.jpg

Every time I retrieve the file, my VBA code substitutes EV_MYFOLDER with the actual path.

If your pictures are all going to be in different folders, then you'll have to store the full path name in the field with the picture. However, if you want to have a specific folder somewhere (anywhere) on your network or server, then you can just store its value in the server somewhere. Whether that's a tempvar or a global variable, or a field on a form, or wherever, it's up to you. But then you can just put the two together.

Thank you Jason for the tip.

Just to expand on Richard's point, files can be in different folders if they are all under a common parent folder:

MyPics
|
|--- FamilyPics
|
|--- WorkPics
|
|--- MiscPics


Then, in your table, you can enter the paths as:

     FamilyPics\pic1.jpg
     FamilyPics\pic2.jpg
     WorkPics\pic3.jpg
     MiscPics\pic4.jpg

To form the full path, just concatenate them with the parent folder ("C:\MyPics\").

This will make moving files easier too, should you need to.  If you move the pics from C to D drive, you only need to change C:\MyPics\ to D:\MyPics\, and nothing else needs to be changed.

I think this is the preferred way no matter how you organize the files.  Having a common parent folder will ensure that everything under it will be "portable."

^ yeah, what he said. 😁