How big is an object reference?

A object or array reference occupies one 32 bit word (4 bytes) on a 32 bit JVM or Davlik VM. A null takes the same space as a reference. (It has to, because a null has to fit in a reference-typed slot; i.e. instance field, local variable, etc.)

On the other hand, an object occupies a minimum of 2 32 bit words (8 bytes), and an array occupies a minimum of 3 32 bit words (12 bytes). The actual size depends on the number and kinds of fields for an object, and on the number and kind of elements for an array.

For a 64 bit JVM, the size of a reference is 64 bits, unless you have configured the JVM to use compressed pointers:

-XX:+UseCompressedOops Enables the use of compressed pointers (object references represented as 32 bit offsets instead of 64-bit pointers) for optimized 64-bit performance with Java heap sizes less than 32gb.

This is the nub of your question, I think.

Before determining the size of the hash table, I wanted to know how much memory would it consume in order not to exagerate.

If you allocate a HashMap or Hashtable with a large initial size, the majority of the space will be occupied by the hash array. This is an array of references, so the size will be 3 + initialSize 32 bit words. It is unlikely that this will be significant ... unless you get your size estimate drastically wrong.

However, I think you are probably worrying unnecessarily about performance. If you are storing objects in a default allocated HashMap or Hashtable, the class will automatically resize the hash table as it gets larger. So, provided that your objects have a decent hash function (not too slow, not hashing everything to a small number of values) the hash table should not be a direct CPU performance concern.

References are nearly free. Even more so when compared to images.

Having a few collisions in a Map isn't a real problem. Collisions can be resolved far quicker than a linear search through a list of items. That said, a Binary Search through a sorted list of items would be a good way to keep memory usage down (compared to a Map).

I can vouch for the effectiveness of a having smaller initial sizes for Maps - I recently wrote a program that makes a Trie structure of 170000 English words. When I set the initial size to 26, I would run out of memory by the time I got to words starting with R. Cutting it down to 5, I was able to create the maps without memory issues and can search the tree (with many collisions) in effectively no time.

[Edit] If a reference is 32 bit (4 bytes) and your average image is around 2 megabytes, you could fit 500000 references into the same space that a single image would take. You don't have to worry about the references.