Storing an image in a database is a bad idea, what are the alternatives?

I have read a lot of stack overflow posts that say that inserting images into the database is bad.

Saving images to DB - Yea or Nay and Saving an image to a database directly or as base64 data? and many others.

the thing is still not obvious to me , where to save the image? in a file on the server ?. in my application the user will upload multiple images and see them in their profile.

an example would be very valuable.

what i did now (now i'm not so good, but i'm learning ..)

            Bitmap bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(getResources(),R.drawable.ic_launcher);          
            ByteArrayOutputStream stream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
            bitmap.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.PNG, 90, stream); //compress to which format you want.
            byte [] byte_arr = stream.toByteArray();
            String image_str = Base64.encodeToString(byte_arr, Base64.DEFAULT);


            //fnish inserting
            List<NameValuePair> nameValuePairs = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();
            nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("username", name));
            nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("password", pass));
            nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("email", emails));
            nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("image", image_str));

            System.out.println(nameValuePairs);
            try {
                HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
                HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost("http://justedhak.comlu.com/users.php");
                httpPost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs));

                HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(httpPost);
                System.out.println(response);
                HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();


            } catch (ClientProtocolException e) {

            } catch (IOException e) {