hello,
sorry to revive this thread, but I have MXD with more than 1500 scanned images, the scanned images are stored in a folder on the map server machine where the ArcGIS installed.
the problem is that I am not able to publish this map service with this count of images (startup time error generated) during the publishing.
I tried to reduce the number to 1250 and successfully published. when trying to increase this number the publishing service startup time out.