Depends if they need to be publicly 'accessible' or not. If these images are meant to be publicly accessible, not private, it would be best to just let the webserver do what it does best and serve the static assets.

If these images need to be accessible you should link your storage/app/public folder to somewhere in public. Then you can link those images as yoursite.com/storage/images/blah.jpg. Then you can use the 'public' disk setup in the filesystem config to write to storage/app/public.

If you don't want these files to be public you can put them any other place in 'storage' you want and then you can just pipe the content of these files out via php, Laravel response download mechanism (for example).

i'd recommend using laravel's storage system to store files, in the long run it's easier to scale