Storing image data in a MySQL database?

I am implementing a project that deals with a significant amount of images.

In your opinion what are the cons/pros of the following two approaches:

• I need to store thousands of items, each item as several string properties and an image.
• Each item as an ID (integer)
• MyISAM tables
• How would you store the images:
  • approach 1: store images into a directory and each image named as ID.jpg
  • approach 2: store images into the database as a binary BLOB

Using approach 1 I can access the image directly and that's it

<img src="same_directory/10.jpg" />  

Using approach 2, I can still use the above HTML, but need to redirect that jpg access to a PHP script which will return the real image from the DB.

In terms of performance which one do you think its faster?

I am keen to approach 1.