<p>I have a form which takes both the user details and an image uploaded by them. I want to write the data to a user table and an image table but i am pretty sure that it cannot be done with just two separate insert statements. Any help would be much appreciated.</p>

You need to insert the user first, then do "SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID()" to retrieve the id of the user. Then you can insert the image in the image table with the newly created user id. In PHP you can actually use
mysql_insert_id()
to retrieve the new id. If you use mysql with InnoDB, you can also wrap the inserts in a
transaction
, by issuing BEGIN, followed by the INSERTs, followed by either COMMIT if everything is successfully added, or ROLLBACK in case of failure.