We've made the decision to store all our non-theme multimedia content (images, video, audio, flash, interpretive dance routines) outside of our CMS.
Currently we have everything on an installation of Gallery2 (with a wary but hopeful eye toward Gallery3). Migrating everything into Gallery2 was really easy, and it gives us buckets of extra options in our tagging, geotagging, pre-scaling, sorting, etc. We have really enthusiastic photographers and videographers, and we believe this will make it much easier to store and find content for later use.
My plan is to replace the Article content type's fields 1) field_main_image (file) and 2) field_thumbnail_image (file) with text fields (urls) into our Gallery2. I can see where I'm going to have to make some changes in the fields my views display, but that's about the extent of the extra work I believe I'm creating for myself.
I haven't been able to find any potential structural downsides. Are there hurdles, or dependencies on those fields that I haven't seen yet?
Has anyone else tried this?
Please share any thoughts on why this is a great idea or pure madness,
--Jason