Fetch Image from the server and display on jsp via servlet

I know this question has been asked many times, but my requirement is bit odd and i am unable to implement with the approach given here

http://balusc.blogspot.com/2007/04/imageservlet.html

I need to display user(say user: "A") photo, when user "A" selects his profile from a drop down list of users in jsp. technologies being used are Spring, Hibernate, Jsp, Servlet, Ajax, Jquery

Requirement is as follows -

• If a user A selects his/her profile from the drop down, it will open his/her profile page with a photograph of his/her.
• If a user B selects his/her profile from the drop down, it will open his/her profile page with a photograph of his/her. and so on.

all the user photographs are located in a remote server drive with a unique id. the id's are being sent from jsp to servlet. Servlet takes the id and do the search on the the remote server directory where thousands of images are stored. (Images name are exactly the same as id)

1) how can we connect to the server drive and locate to the image directory in servlet? 2) optimal way to search the image against the given Unique id? ( if there are thousands of images are present in the folder)

Any help would be appreciated.. Thanks