In the last release of 'Image' module, a new option was introduced at ./admin/settings/image/image_import: "Number of images to list per page". Supposedly, this is intended to allow for quicker imports of larger image sets. However, when this setting is configured for a largish amount of images, e.g. "100", the image import fails to initialize. The import screen loops for hours at an url like ./batch?id=2139&op=do_nojs, saying: "Importing images ... initializing", but does not create any image nodes.

This is really annoying as it really takes a lot of time to enter node titles and descriptions/body texts for 100 images.

Steps to reproduce: Try to put around 120 JPEG images (not too large, scaled offline to something like 1920x1920px) into the import folder; in my case it's around 160 MB of data to process. When importing around 25 images per import screen, the initialization works as expected (takes a couple of minutes; image import of 25 images takes around 10 minutes total on a dual Xeon with 24 GB of RAM). So as it seems, the new configuration option doesn't work for larger image sets.