Changing URL path of images can affect traffic?

[rowtc2]

I have a web site with ~8.000 images indexed by Google Images. Traffic from Google images is low (0.5%). I want to put them on another server (CDN) to improve page load speed.

Now path to images is
http://www.mysite.com/images/no1.jpg

I want to change it to
http:/subdomain.mysite.com/images/no1.jpg

Should i put 301 redirect to images to not loose images already indexed in Google Images? What is your experience with this, there are possible fluctuations from Google Web search because i change path to images?

[edited by: tedster at 9:59 pm (utc) on Jul 2, 2011]
[edit reason] delink the example URLs [/edit]

[tedster]

I have not noticed fluctuations in web search from moving images to a subdomain. However, I cannot say I've ever worried about image search traffic very much. It seems to me that losses would be inevitable without a 301.