thanks for your reply.
Interesting. I didn't know that BLOBS were returned as base64 from the database.
Actually I was just trying to find what OpenACS functions could be used to actually return the BLOB data back to the IMG inside the page. I did see that people use small includes inside the image tag and the include program does a "cr_write_content" call but that only works when the image is stored in the conent resository.
I was just trying to find the equivalent function to return a BLOB back to the browser in an include.
But I gave up and went back to using the content repository and its functions after figuring out how to make or use my data as an object (that was why i couldn't use it before)