well, what I use to do is just open the images folder in the public_html and upload my images from the suppliers there in bulk. Then when I use Easy Populate to add new product I just include the image name in the column for the images in EP such as "image.jpg" then when I go to the store front the image is there.

Now the hosting company is telling me that I have 24K images in that folder so the ftp program can't handle that. They advised me to create another directory to my images which makes sense if I knew how to do it. Note that I have other mods installed on the server and site is live so I can't afford to screw things up. Which is why I am asking for help.