I expect to host a website with many images, and I mean many - around 300-400k.I am wondering if the number of items on my server affects access time? In other words, will GET requests be slower because I host so many images? Is saving images in plain folders even the way to go? Should I use some other method of organising images, such as databases?The main concern here is how fast the client can get images from server.Thanks for help
is access time of images dependant on number of images on server?
apache;server;webserver
The short answer is yes and no :P  Access time will depend on the power of your server and the speed of your server's network connection.  So having lots of images on an underpowered server will affect things, but on an an adequately powered server won't.If you have information about the location of images in a database rather than a direct link you you will slow things down by as long as it takes to access the database (milliseconds?).  For me, the benefits of managing files via a database compared to managing hundreds of thousands of direct links is overwhelming.