Thanks Shawn,

The album stuff is very interesting, i like the idea of doing it that way. Your uploading files description makes sense, i expect the client will upload via ftp and doing the preview bit via the hook_file_action, not fully dug into it yet, but i assume there would be a way to have this generate preview on demand e.g. if the file has been uploaded via ftp.

Will be digging into this more today, around on #drupal and #drupal-support if your about fire me a msg