ImageDatastore works really well if you have a parent class and 1 sub folder per class.
imageDatastore('parentfolder/','IncludeSubFolders',true','LabelSource','foldernames');
If not, you may have to do a little more processing. I'm sure there's a ton of ways to accomplish this: I would suggest getting all of your images and labels for each class into a datastore
class1 = imageDatastore({'cat1/random_folder/','cat1/'});
class1.Labels = repelem("cat1",numImages);
Do this for each class, then combine them into one super datastore
imdsFinal = imageDatastore([class1.Files; class2.Files]);
imdsFinal.Labels = [class1.Labels; class2.Labels]);
This should work and be able to customize to what you're trying to do!
