Help with pictures en Java

[susan]

Recently, I found that initialzing a new ImageIcon in the paint function is a terrible thing to do, as it will always look for the image which will slow the game down and/or flicker.
So the solution to this problem is to define the ImageIcon in the class, and call the picture in public void init or something.

However, would I have to do this process for 100++ pictures? I tried to use and array to load all my pictures, but then I had a problem finding the one I needed. Is there another solution to stop the game from being so slow/flickering?
Or just a better way to do this in general?

[cachi]

Can you associate the pictures with some type of string?
Such as the filename or something of that sort?
That way you can look it up in a hashmap which will give you as close as O(1) time as you're going to get.
There is also included a way to get the entrySet from the hashmap if you need to go through each of them.
This is included in the API:
HashMap

Basically I think you need to look into ways to optimizing the whole thing. It may be worth wild to do a search on Google about optimizing java code. Besides that without looking at the code I can't tell you much else about it.

Greetings.