Hi Tore. Yes, thats a similar system to what I worked out for our purposes. I think its a good solution and fast. Much better imo than fiddling with memo fields.

Regards.

>Hi Jos
>
>In an application I use daily at my company, we have an application with roughly 100 000 pictures, and to overcome the speed issue with many pictures in one directory, I have put all the pictures in a directory tree with 'main' directories called 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, each with subdirectories 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 0. So in total I have 90 different directories for the pictures. All my picture filenames are unique 8 digit numbers plus extension, and placed in the subdirectory which corresponds to the first two digits in the filename. So file 12345678.jpg is in directory pictures\1\2, picture 98765432.gif is in directory pictures\9\8 and so on. The 'value' of the filename is always in the range 10 000 000 to 99 999 999, so I have plenty of space for more pictures.
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>I have a function to find the file when the filename is given, and 'getting' the picture file is extremely fast. This also means that my filename field is only c(8) and does not take up too much space. The file type I get from the extension.
>
>Earlier I had all pictures in one directory, and it was slooow because no file system 'likes' too many files in one directury.
>