Any workflow tips for dealing with hundreds of textures?

I'm working on a project where the client has supplied hundreds of thumnail sized product images. I need to turn these into materials and apply each one to a plane which will go into a cloner. Is there any way to streamline this process?

I know of the image2plane plugin, which will take all of those images, create standard materials from them and apply them to planes. I can then convert them all into redshift materials. BUT this leaves me with hundreds of incorrectly set up materials which I then need to fix one by one and it takes such a long time.

Is there a better way of doing this, like using an expression to drive the file suffix number? They are all labelled product_####.png so the only difference I need between all those materials is the number in the file path.