Storing a large number of images

Question

I\'m thinking about developing my own PHP based gallery for storing lots of pictures, maybe in the tens of thousands.

At the database I\'ll point to the url of the i

Answer 1

I know is impractical to have all of them sitting at the same directory in the server as it would slow access to a crawl.

This is an assumption.

I have designed systems where we had millions of files stored flat in one directory, and it worked great. It's also the easiest system to program. Most server filesystems support this without a problem (although you'd have to check which one you were using).

http://www.databasesandlife.com/flat-directories/