dbase table setup

[Anon]

this isn't striclty PHP, sorry

I'm setting up a MySQL dbase for an online image gallery. It will host about 50.000 - 100.000 images, with each image having 10 simple text fields in the dbase (like name, path, size etc.) - the images themselves won't be stored in the dbase. They are divided into 50 categories.

My question is: what would be the best way of setting up the dbase: one large table with all images, or 50 seperate category-tables with their own images? Would any one of these seriously effect the speed in which the gallery-pages are loaded?

thanks for any help