IMHO, there's a better way to handle the deletion of lob objects than the suggested here. The programmer can easily forget to unlink the lob. With the following trigger, no programmer actions are required.
By the way, one problem with bytea fields is that when you query the database, if you ask for that field, the data is actually retrieved. When you query for and oid, only the oid is retrieved and then you can open the lob whenever you want (if it's required).
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION oidtable_after_update_delete()
RETURNS "trigger" AS
$BODY$
BEGIN
IF (TG_OP = 'UPDATE') THEN
IF (OLD.oidfield = NEW.oidfield) OR (OLD.oidfield IS NULL) THEN
RETURN NEW;
END IF;
END IF;
IF (EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM pg_largeobject WHERE loid = OLD.oidfield)) THEN
PERFORM LO_UNLINK (OLD.oidfield);
END IF;
RETURN NEW;
END;
$BODY$
LANGUAGE 'plpgsql' VOLATILE;
CREATE TRIGGER oidtable_after_update_delete
AFTER UPDATE OR DELETE
ON oidtable
FOR EACH ROW
EXECUTE PROCEDURE oidtable_after_update_delete();