Best batch photo upload applet

I'm looking to handle image uploads on a site I'm building. All the behind the scenes stuff is fine, but creating an intuitive front-end is causing me head pains. The problem with handling photos in a world where most people have asynchronous internet connections is the photos' size. I want each user to upload (at least) 10-20 images of an event. On modern cameras, 10-20 images translates to 50-200megs. If people have 256kbps upload speed, it's already ~15 minutes just in transfer. My experience is that people are just not that patient when it comes to waiting for something to happen... So I need to do something about it. I'm looking for a Flash/Java (no Silverlight, please) applet that can resize images on the client-side to a specified width and upload that much smaller file. If I can get images down to a few hundred KB, it might be a usable system. Edit: This is for a personal project. The one suggestion so far is for something that costs $184. I wish I had that much disposable cash for these days! My max budget is around $40 though I'd naturally prefer something free and open source =)