File References in FMP7 and photos

Has anyone used file references successfully in FMP7 to track photos/images? I have just started to play with them, but some of the issues are

a) They only seem to be able to be manipulated using AppleScript (on Mac, not sure how on Windows), so cross-platform solutions are difficult

: I can't figure out how to control whether the contents of the file or a reference is stored. Of course, when you set the field directly, you get to choose, but how when automating a process? It appears that the applescript step:

set cell 1 of record 1 of table "playing around with file refs" of database "ABH Photos" to file "Assam1:Users:aharper:Desktop:91.tif"

assigns a reference, because the tif file is many 100's of megabytes, and the resulting database is 1000's of times smaller. But what if I wanted to store the contents? How do I distinguish them?

c) What are the rules for resolving a file reference? Is it an alias, or a stored internally as a string?

d) What are the rules for displaying a file reference in Browse mode? In the above file, it appears that FMP is parsing the entire tiff every time I open the file, as my computer hangs for a while after opening a database with 1 record and 1 field that references the tiff.

e) Are there any features for getting at the contents of a file reference w/in FileMaker (converting to a string, for example).?

For the moment, I am going to continue to store my file references as strings, and manipulate them through a combination of FileMaker calculation fields and AppleScripts as I have for FMP6, but I'd love others' thoughts.

Thx