We are considering moving our user profile images from the local server to the Rackspace CDN (Cloud Files).

However, how do you keep track of where each user's profile image is located on the CDN? Wouldn't you have to store the CDN URL for each user image in the local Database and query it every time you display a user image? Isn't that slower than accessing a user image directly on the local server which requires no such DB query to retrieve since you already know where it is stored based on the user's User ID?

What if a user has an album of pics? How would you keep track of all those images that belong just to that one user? What about the order of those pics?

In the case of the Rackspace CDN, we're looking at using a Container for each individual user to help keep things more logically organized, but we don't know what the best way to track all of it is since the CDN provides a seemingly random URL for each image. To make matters worse, you can't even delete a non-empty Container belonging to a user when they delete their account, you actually have to delete each object inside the Container one-by-one before deleting the Container itself. It doesn't end there, you can't even have nested Containers or "sub-folders", and you can't rename a file (you must copy it with a new name and delete the old one manually).

It just sounds so incredibly more complicated then we thought it would be, and it certainly does not feel "intuitive" compared to local storage, so we don't know what to do.

Please help.