I'd be curious to examine the activeX component a little more, but there are no controls that will grab all subfiles on a selected folder. You can't really implement one in javascript because it doesn't have access to grab too much information from the user's computer and even if activeX did, your user would have to install it and enable it each time they wanted to use it. I actually liked that guy's dhtml example, but as you mentioned, that is rather annoying when having to select 100 photos. The flash part was pretty slick, but that will require you to be able to implement the flash piece, and it can be tricky to interoperate flash with server actions if you don't know what you are doing. It was because of these reasons that I stuck with using zip files. This, of course, carries its own set of cons, but it was the best solution for my needs.