If you walk around the city of London, you won’t have too much trouble finding Gough Square, hidden behind Fleet Street. There is probably only one long-ordered chain you know well, and have known well for a long time: your alphabet.
Now, we could use just two arrays: one with the image data, and one with a matching index holding the keys. The data array would need cells big enough to hold image data, while the index array just needs cells big enough to hold small strings.
What we want is a function that sits between the nice human-readable key and an indexed array of images.