I want to create a search tree with files on a computer and search the tree to see if the tree contains specific files. Then I thought, why not use one tree for images and one for videos, for example. That would make the search for an image or video faster, since the number of comparisons should reduce. But then I thought, couldnt I break it down even further, and use one tree for each set of images that begins with a specific letter and then map that search tree to the specific letter using a hashmap. Then the number of comparisons would be even smaller.
I tried searching for using multiple binary search trees to search for an item, but I couldn't find anything. Is there a downside to using multiple binary search trees? Have I misunderstood something?
and use one tree for each set of images that begins with a specific letter
This is effectively adding a 26-ry (or more, for capital letters, digits, etc.) tree node below your other trees. So you can do that... but then why not make the entire tree the same way? With a slight generalization, you can get a trie.