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