I have just built a website using K2 that has several thousand items. The associated images for each item have been arranged alphabetically in folders eg Images/A images/B etc. A lot of the folders have between 200 and 500 images in them which the K2 Media Manger can't deal with .

It can take up to 20 seconds for a folder to open. I need a far better solution.

A) is there a way to enable some sort of cache for the media manger
b) Is there an alternative plug in that works better
c) Is there a way to configure K2 to use the Joomla media manager

I think with several thousand items, you can not browse to select image to post new item, you must be select manual, example
nhandan.com.vn/chinhtri/tin-tuc-su-kien/item/27098302-viet-nam-va-campuchia-tang-cuong-hop-tac-ve-cong-tac-thanh-tra.html
this site using K2 and images was sorted by year / user/ month / filename

This less than stellar Media Manager has now turned up an new problem.

You can upload files that have a space in the file name ( yes i know its no a good thing to do ) . When the file is inserted into the K2 Item the spaces are replaced with %20 which then causes an error when the K2 Item is saved.

Surely I'm not the first person to come across these obvious issues with K2

I'm desperately looking for a way to replace the standard media manager with a better option

The filename issue cannot be solved, you shoud use filenames with no spaces and special characters.

As for caching, since it would still make 200+ HTML request for these images, it will make any difference. This is not an issue of the media manager, servers can only serve a certain amount of requests per domain. Pretty much all managers would still have to fetch that large amount of images.

If you are using a high traffic, rich media site you can look for a CDN solution which moves media to subdomains.