Uploading multiple files simultaneously

Hello,

For a site on which I am working we have need of a basic image gallery. We don't need complicated functionality, just the basics: a gallery is owned by a user and contains multiple images through which other users can browse. To that end I've been looking at shazamgallery, which is at right level of functionality. However, it handles images a little backwards. When uploading an image you select the gallery to which they belong, rather than uploading a set of images when the gallery is created. The shazamgallery page states that they will never support batch upload because image_import does, but image_import appears to require either shell or FTP access, which is mind-blazingly stupid for a large site whose user-base is not technically oriented. If I'm mistaken about this I'll gladly be corrected.

In any event, I want to modify the gallery submission form to contain multiple file selection elements. This is not the problem, but rather I don't know the "drupal way" to handle multiple file uploads. This page describes the process for a single image, but the multi-file case is different. My form produces elements with names edit[images][0...n], where n is some fixed number (say, 20). However, if I stop the form processing and dump $_FILES and $node I see nothing in the former and $node->images is a big array of NULL entries. What is the correct (i.e., "drupal") way to handle this situation?

Thanks.