Image trim is a static part of the report definition used to enhance the look of the report and is not user bitmap data retrieved through image fields from the user's data tables. 4GL procedures cannot contain initialized image trim objects, so the image trim used by a report procedure must be stored elsewhere.

During report definition these images are stored in the database or on disk. This makes porting dynamic procedures difficult since the location of the required images is encoded within the report. If the images were originally stored in the database, the Reporter catalogs would need to exist and the images would need to be stored with the same unique keys and names. The only way this could be accomplished safely is to load the Reporter catalogs from the original design database.

For images stored on disk the same path to the image files would have to exist on the target machine. This requires bitmap image files to be deployed in addition to the report.

These mechanisms are still available but, in addition, more portable mechanisms are provided for handling both types of image storage.