Store images on database or filesystem?

[eluser]Mushex Antaranian[/eluser]
As I get you, you don't want to keep another table in db for assigning images to your product, and think (truely ) that it will require more resources with scanning directory for filenames with certain prefix.
Then you can simply create new directory for each product (lets say named by product id) and store images there. It will not let you connect an image with 2 or more product, but the same problem you'll have with prefixes.

P.S. I can't say anything about performance, I'm connecting files to items with db records, but looks like it will faster than via filtering thousands of images by prefix.