Bulk image upload

The aim of this project is to add a page to an existing system to facilitate bulk image uploads, image search and download requiring serveral different levels of user permissions. The user will have a folder containing 6 folders(market sectors). In each of these sector folders there will be 2 subfolders (Restricted and unrestricted images). In each of these folders there will be a number of subfolders varying from sector to sector and from day to day. In each of those folders there will be images. Lots of them. The user will be uploading these images in bulk (100+ a time) having sorted them into the required folders manually to determine their content (because this is the way the company works). The new pages need to create some kind of association between the images in a folder so that it can recognise what has already been displayed in the search results on page one and what hasn't (the system currently tries to display all hundreds of results on one page which makes it run painfully slow or crash). The idea of a user manually adding tags is out of the question because it would take too long to do this for hundreds of images. The new scripts should also bundle up everything in the cart into a single ZIP for download. Obviously the new pages would have to visually mirror the existing system (which performs a number of other tasks so Im not going to replace it). I'm not a programmer or a web designer or anything like that so I have no idea how it should work. That part is up to the winning provider. All I know is this: The user must be able to point at the aforementioned directory and have the system sort the images into a folder and create associations in the database so that it can display 100+ results in an image gallery with 16thumbs to a page. The system must be able to dynamically populate list boxes with the folder names in the subdirectories so that the user can select their criteria based on real-time directories. The system must be able to add selected images to the existing cart and then be able to bundle the contents of that cart into a single ZIP for download when the users finished. I think thats it. Good luck, I know it's a tall order.