Maximum number of images in a sharepoint 2010 folder

Question

Currently there is a sharepoint site in our org and one of the function that I'm working on is related to the storage of images in sharepoint.

There was a design decision made way back such that all Images be stored in a single folder on sharepoint (Im not sure if I need to use the term folder/library). One application feeds to this folder and multiple other applications consume it.

Now, the problem/scenario is that we have about 11000+ images in that folder. As per sharepoint developers at our org, the recommended threshold is 5000 and they wanted the applications to change. The reason they quote is a performance issue.

As per microsoft website http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262787(v=office.15).aspx the threshold per library is 30,000,000 and threshold per list view is 5000.

Our application is the producer of the images on the sharepoint site. We use Java Webservices (SOAP) to post the images. (Imaging and Lists webservice). As far as I'm aware, there is no application which would need to query the database to retrieve more than 5000 rows per list.

Now my questions, which I need you ppl to help is as below:

1. What is the difference between a folder and a library? (In context of Imaging if necessary).
2. Can we continue to put images in to the same folder? (Current limit is extended uptil 13000).
3. I know that sharepoint allows to created a folder within a folder for a document library. Is this same true for Images as well? (I did not observe a menu to create a sub folder).

We are currently using sharepoint 2010.

Answer 1

You can think of a folder as essentially another view. You can continue to put everything in the same folder, but as you have noticed you'll have issues using the OOTB interface to return all results.

You can also apply indexes to the lists to help return images in bulk.

You should be able to create additional folders if needed including folders in folders. The picture library looks a bit different but it's effectively a document library in the scheme of things so you can do all of the same things.

If you want to start organizing your files, consider using the content organizer and setting up rules as the files are uploaded. You can have it set up rules to move the files into subfolders based upon metadata of the image such as the modified date. For example, you could group things by year.

I hope this helps.