archiver script
 

Been trying to search the web for a simple script/management system to present users the possibility to download pre-defined directories in compressed format. The directories usually hold hundreds of pictures so clicking individually is a daunting task.

So what I had in mind would be a php/perl script that compresses directories on demand and presents it to the requester. Additional features like limiting the amounts and so forth would be helpful...

Now, what type of system is this running on? As I think it might make a bit of a difference.
Without a complete idea of PHP I'll just ramble on so bear with me.
I'm thinking of all of this in Linux, sorry if you've already thought of this.
What I'd probably do is try to make a simple script(ie shell script)so that I can at least see if I could figure it out in the first place.
What you might be able to do is do a dir listing in PHP and pipe the output to a tar or zip. if using PHP, then you could use Bzip2(Bzip2 docs) to just zip the dir itself.
I doubt it helped, but hopefully it might have had some use.

Yeah I would have done that ages ago if I just could find some time to learn some PHP.

Heh, I'm in the same boat as you. Tonight I'll look at my PHP book and hopefully it'll have some info on listing dir's and the like. It seems like it can be done, maybe not easily but possibly.