I am running Access 2007 and have a database that contains many images for one of my collections. These are stored as OLE Bitmap images in one of the tables. To save space, I would like to link some of them rather than embed them. I have done this and the images are clearly shown as linked in the table, but access is still storing an embedded bitmap somewhere in the database. I have experimented by creating 1000 new rows with linked images and the database size went up to 600mb - clearly showing it is still embedding a version of the image. I also note that if I edit one of the images at source, access still shows the old image until I go into the table and open the image, which then updates to the edited one - also proving my point.
Obviously this defeats the object of using linking to reduce database size.


I have not found any reference to anyone else having this problem.
I am wondering if this is a known bug (feature!) of Access 2007 and whether Access for Office 365 has the same problem. I am reluctant to migrate to Office 365 at the moment.
Anyone else come across this and knows if there is some setting or something preventing the correct linking procedure.

I could change all be Bound Object Frames to Images and populate the images at run-time, but I still want to have some images from OLE embedded images in the database tables.

A bit long winded, but any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Miles R