Best way to build a file viewer....tips?

[Anon]

I am building a photo viewer for some friends and the way I have it now the user has ftp access and just uploads their pics into their folder on the server according to date "/tmp/user/05_01_01/pics.jpg".

So now for the front end when someone goes to view their pics the php script will view the files based on what username they are viewing and build a list, first for the date folders, then for the contents of the folders.

My question is for the visiting user instead of displaying dates for folder names I would like to display the date and a description....so it would look something like this, "05_01_01 - These are my pics from the other day...". What would be the best way for me to acheive this. Should I ask the uploading user to put a text file with just the description inside the folder and have the script read the folder name then view the text file for the description?

I also have a MySQL database attached so if you can think of a way to incorperate that go ahead. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for the user uploading files...

[kennethl]

If you've got access to MySQL, perhaps the easiest way to do this would be to move to an http interface for the uploads rather than FTP.
You'd make a password-protected form with a file field and a description (text) field. Upon submission, insert the image and the description into your table, along with the current date. Build your list of links to images from the stored date and description info, and link to a script that sends a "Content-type: image/jpeg" or "image/gif" header followed by the contents of the file.
Or at the time of submission, the script could save the file to a directory and you could make your links as normal.