We are attempting to use the BDC to display employee info from an external SQL Server db. One of the fields we need to display is an Image type. Will this field be displayed as an image by the BDC?
Image type is used for more than images, its a BLOB. SharePoint doesn't support rendering image file formats from the database. I would recommend using a URL and preload the images to an image library. Or use a web service that can serve images.
BDC won't be able to render a image type as an image. You can fetch the URL from DB and customize XSLT to display it.If you can't do this then you will have to write some custom code. One option on top of my head is to create connectable webpart and get the fiesl of image type as an input for this webpart. Then you can just write code in C# to convert and display the image.