James Huff on "FTP images"

I tried to upload about 10 gigs of images to the uploads folder, and made the appropriate postmeta data entries as well for the associated posts. Is there anything else I need to do? Should I get some plugin to manage the rest of this? I've seen suggestions online but they don't handle entire directories of files.

Did you use https://wordpress.org/plugins/add-from-server/ to add them to your Media library?

No, they explicitly say it's not for large amounts of files (I have about 100,000 images that need to be recognized). I tried doing about 5000 and it didn't work, and on their forums some guy asked if it would support 2000 and they said probably not.

I would even be willing to use a tool that can get me about 3,000 or so at a per request for the time being.

So, instead of 1 directory with 100,000 files, how about 100 directories with 1,000 files?

You might need to temporarily boost PHP's memory limit to 512M, but that should work.

I was under the impression the file structure of wordpress media was required (meaning everything from this month belongs in the ../2016/04 folder and not in any children folders). I was also under the impression that the images needed to be replicated and modified to fit the different thumbnail sizes, as all of the photos I've uploaded directly through the site have gone through this process. Thanks for the help by the way!

Also, are you still suggesting that through add-from-server?

Yes, the standard directory structure *should* be observed, but that doesn't mean you couldn't do:

/2016/01/[1,000 individual photos]
/2016/02/[1000 more]
/2016/03/[1000 more]

etc.

Yes, all through add-from-server.

As far as I know, it's really the only reliable way to do this, but given server resource limitations, it's going to take some time and you'll have to split them up like that.