10,000 images is not over the break even point yet (unless you do something really hard resulting in a runtime significantly larger than what it would cost to farm out that job to a bunch of EC2 instances, it's all about the question whether your time is more expensive than the cost to rent the hardware to do the job).
It starts to pay off when you write that package either as a service with a large number of users or if you make a general purpose library for inclusion in lots of other programs, especially if they are written in other languages.
It starts to pay off when you write that package either as a service with a large number of users or if you make a general purpose library for inclusion in lots of other programs, especially if they are written in other languages.