uploading images by directory

Good evening. We have about 15 thousand products with images in the OneBox database, which are synchronized with the online store on opencart. By default, images are loaded into one single directory /image/catalog/ and it ends up with a lot of images! Which in turn causes "braking" of the site (frontend), because. the image handler script accesses the directory each time and reads all of its contents. Is it possible to somehow optimize this process on your part? Can you somehow modify the script so that when uploading images, they are scattered across several different folders? For example, /image/catalog/img_1/, /image/catalog/img_2/, /image/catalog/img_3/ and so on, at least up to 100 pieces. Then in each directory there will be a minimum of images and the site in this case does not slow down when visitors view it. And how much will it cost? Thank you!