Just a guess based on practices at other publishingpanies. Source photos are quite often very large digitally. One photo can be much much larger than the of the story byte-count wise. The story might span 2KB while the photos surpass 5MB. That a 251 ratio. Photos are separated from their story and stored in a highlypressed data base on a separate server. Metadata for the article provides a coded pointer to each photo. Then the of the story may be stored efficiently and safely. Stripping out the photos makes archiving fast for both storage and recovery. If the photos were included those megabytes would slow both processes. If ever the story needs to be reassembled for example for legal use based on a court order the metadata enables recovery and dpression of the photos by aputer that won corrupt the file if something goes haywire. An alternative is to store each story as a PDF.