SVN and uploaded files in public/images

This is a “best practice” question. I’m setting up svn/capistrano to
easily modify, update, track, and deploy a rails app. I’m the only
person working on the code, but the site content - both in the
database and in the public/images directory - is updated daily by
somebody else. Images are uploaded through the site and stored in
public/images, which is now almost 1GB. The image/content changes are
immediately incorporated into the live, working version of the site.

My question is this: How should I sync public/images between the live
site, the svn repository, and my local workstation? I can think of
two basic scenarios - using svn to do it all or having svn ignore
public/images and using rsync instead - but I’m wondering if anybody
else has experience with this and what seems to work best. I’ll admit
that I’m new to subversion and capistrano, so I might be missing an
obvious solution.

I guess that I’m ultimately going for this scenario:

—I’d like to work from my local machine on a copy of the site that
is no more than one day behind the live version, including recent
changes to the database and images.

—I’d like to be able to deploy my local code changes to the live
site with capistrano.

—I don’t want my deployment to affect or overwrite the changes that
somebody else makes to the site database and images

—The other employee will not use anything but a web interface for
uploading images and adding content (no svn).

Is there a proper way to do this? Thank you for any help.

-Kyle