I’m also trying to read image files as fast as possible, you can check my question here
Loading 10k images with Images.load() on my computer takes:
21.982461 seconds (2.49 M allocations: 991.897 MiB, 0.47% gc time)
Loading the same images with ArrayFire.load_image() function gives:
7.332682 seconds (229.77 k allocations: 14.024 MiB)
ArrayFire stores the images on GPU so I’m not confident with memory allocation but it is surely time-efficient. I am not using bulk reading in my algorithm but load and process is fast enough combined with @distributed parallelism.