Laravel 5.5 Shared Hosting Storage Folder Images

I have completed a project on laravel 5.5 and i have two questions before i move the project to the shared hosting server that i own

1. I do not have access to the command line on hostgator shared server. Hence unable to run php artisan storage:link command. This makes all the images break and not displayed. I know there is a method to move the images to the public folder and call them directly with asset() method. But the project that im dealing with is huge, and would be difficult to manually update to asset() in every place where i used images. Is there any other method that i could use to display images from the storage folder

2. I see that Laravel 5.6 is released. I tried to update the project from 5.5 to 5.6 by updating php, laravel, fideloper and tinker version in the composer.json file. However when i use composer update command i receive a error laravel 5.6 is not satisfiable and shows other packages like page views counter and sluggable that im using to be removed. Is it okay to use laravel 5.5 for the next two years or are there any benefits of shifting to 5.6

Any help would be appreciated