I've been trying to improve performance on my site by minimizing the number of round-trips to the server to retrieve files. I've found scripts out there to dynamically merge css files and javascript files into a single download, and I wondered if something similar could be done for images... Interestingly, I accidently discovered that youtube does exactly this by merging a bunch of their images into a single file, and then dynamically plucking them from this 'image menu' using the css background scroll. Cool, you say? That's what I thought. I threw this script together by merging a variety of other scripts I found on the net. Enjoy. Just drop it on your server, and pass the relative path of the directory you want it to draw files from --- here's an example: http://www.yourserver.com /combine.php?dir=/images/ Note: it will filter the files -- will only read .png .gif and .jpg (or .jpeg), so you don't ahve to worry if you have other files types in that directory as well.