heidialyssa wrote: The uploads are broken up into separate smaller subdirectories so there are fewer files in each directory. (This matters more if you're a big site with tens of thousands of uploaded files.) There are a couple reasons for this: * Some filesystems don't handle large numbers of files in a directory very efficiently. Smaller directories are faster to access. * In theory you could break up the upload area across multiple drives/partitions if necessary. * Doing a directory list on ten thousand files is kind of annoying. :) Smaller directories are easier to peek at when debugging. The numbers are derived from a cryptographic hash of the filename and don't mean anything in particular; they're just there to divide things up evenly (whereas something like using the first letter of the filename would cause large clusters on some letters). One problem however is that if PHP is running in "safe mode" the restrictions sometimes stop the subdirectories from working. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)