I have a Rich Text Area field in which I'm storing images only. When this field is accessed through APEX, an HTML tag `<img>` is returned with it's properties. 

In the controller of my VF page, I am doing a substring to get the URL of the image from the `src` property which works well when I access the page from within the SF instance `/apex/thePage`. The result URL that I'm getting is something like this : 

    https://c.cs17.content.force.com/servlet/rtaImage?eid=a1Cg0000000JDAi&feoid=00Ng0000000MTcp&refid=0EMg00000007o4U

If I access the same relative path through my site however, I don't have permissions to access that record/object.

> I've got 2 questions here:
> 
> 1) Where are the images stored in the instance (which object), and can
> they be accessed from anywhere else but the RTA field itself?
> 
> 2) Is there any way to reference the URL of the image in a specific
> format so that the Site can access it (If an object needs permissions for the site profile, which object would that be)?
> 
> NOTES : 
> 
> 1) I can't output the RTA field on the page due to the complexity and
> the structure of the template, I can only reference the URL of the
> image (Using `<apex:image` adds other elements around the image).
> 
> 2) The data model is already built this way, so please don't suggest
> moving the images to other objects etc.