How to redirect image URL?

[musicfreer]

I have put all images under store/images directory without making subdirectories.

However, my hosting just warned me to restructure the directories so that I will not have more than 1024 files in 1 directory. Otherwise my hosting account will be suspended.

My image files are named systematically, and I believe I can redirect the images easily by .htaccess

for example:

the original path is:
images/AAA001.jpg

I want to make it redirect to:
images/AAA/AAA001.jpg

and of course I want this rule to apply to:
AAA001-AAA999
BBB001-BBB999
CCC001-CCC999
...
...

I need the rule to search for the first few characters of the file, if it returns AAA, then redirect it to images/AAA/AAAxxx.jpg


How should I write the .htaccess?

Thanks in advance!

[kobra]

Just move them and repoint them through the product setup screen in the admin

[musicfreer]

Just move them and repoint them through the product setup screen in the admin

Thanks for your reply.

However, I have over thousand products and I cannot afford to repoint the image files one by one.

Is there any faster method? I believe htaccess can help rewrite or redirect.

Anyone is familiar about it?

thanks!

[kobra]

Is there any faster method?

Some use easy populate for these things

[nigelt74]

I had to do a similar thing

I just moved all the products imaages starting with aa to images/aa

Then ran a script on the database

Basically finding every instance of "images/aa" in the image field of the product table and replacing it with images/aa/aa

although i did test the script on a copy of the database running on my local wamp server