Web Site directories getting too big

Question

The images folder on my site now contains over 3,000 images
of wild flowers and related stuff. These images appear on the
relevant but separate web pages of which there are now over 2,000.
You find your way round all this using various indexes which point
to the folders containing the web pages. The site will get bigger
each year and I need to re-structure it for example putting all the
images beginning with A in one directory and B in another etc.
This is easily done but how can I do this and get Dreamweaver
CS3 to update the links - copying and pasting doesn't seem to do it
and dragging and dropping prompts for some updated links but not
all. Updating over 2,000 pages by hand seem a touch tedious as each
one would take about 20 minutes minimum.
I don't really think this can be done easily can it??

Answer 1

You can use mod_rewrite (
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html
) on Apache or even a 404 error handler to map requests from
http://www.somesite.net/images/foo.jpg
to
http://www.somesite.net/images/theCorrectSubdirectory/foo.jpg
or wherever you moved the file to.