Multimedia databases include many types of new data. One common property of these data items is that they are very large. We exploit the concept of transformational representations to logically store images without the bitmap. This technique is similax to views in traditional database systems. The technique is useful when users axe editing images in the database to create new images. Our method produces significant space savings over already compressed images, and potentially greater savings for video and audio. The method requires the support of multimedia editors. This paper emphasizes the meta-structure needed by the database to support multimedia editing.