I would think it should be fairly easy to create a php script that grabs all of the images and dynamically dumps them (re-sized) into a page.
I still know very little about php but I have a vague idea of how I would approach it. You could use a filesystem (?) object to get the names of the subdirectories of /image and put those directory names in an array. (I'm not sure exactly what object php uses for this but I'm sure there's something that enables retrieving directory contents.) Then, get the file names in each of those directories and associate them with their category with either customized objects or a two-dimensional array or something along those lines. (If the files and categories are already in a database, you wouldn't even need to bother with all of that, but I don't think they are.) Then it's a simple matter of generating the page with the category names and image names.
I think brad can handle it, despite the fact he's Canadian. Maybe if he's too busy raping mooses or playing hockey I could do some experimentation on my own and send over a completed script. It would take me a while, though, and it would suck, of course.
If bandwidth is an issue and someone else wants to host the thing, there could be a script on SC that just generates the list of file names, categories, and paths and then the host would just need to have a script that can extract the data from the SC page. (Or could one just write a script to get the directories and file names straight off the SC server? I wouldn't know how to do it but I suppose it's possible.) It might just be better, however, to shrink the images down. The extra storage space the new images take up would be negligible compared to the bandwidth eaten up each time a page with full-sized files is loaded. Maybe a combination of shrinking and dynamic page generation is the best answer. The batch conversion would be a good way to convert all of the existing files but some manual labor would still be required to generate shrunken versions of new images as they get added.
OK, maybe I shouldn't have had that second espresso.
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"And Wirthling isn't worth the paper he isn't printed on."
