We will learn how to upload multiple files using a single form. This is required if you are allowing members to upload more than one file and you don't know how many files you allow them to upload. Say you want up to 8 files any member of your site can upload. As your members upload and delete files so at the time of displaying the form to allow them to upload you would like to check the existing number of files they have and accordingly display them upload fields to add files. Here will try that.  Here we will set one variable to the number of text fields to display and this value can be controlled based on the requirement or can be set by a script. Here is the code to display the form and please read the file upload tutorial on this section.


$max_no_img=4; // Maximum number of images value to be set here

echo "<form method=post action=addimgck.php enctype='multipart/form-data'>";
echo "<table border='0' width='400' cellspacing='0' cellpadding='0' align=center>";
for($i=1; $i<=$max_no_img; $i++){
echo "<tr><td>Images $i</td><td>
<input type=file name='images[]' class='bginput'></td></tr>";
}

echo "<tr><td colspan=2 align=center><input type=submit value='Add Image'></td></tr>";
echo "</form> </table>";

This part will display the form and the number of upload boxes as per set by the variable. Now we will move to next part explaining how to handle the uploaded file and how to know what are the fields uploaded by the user. We will be using PHP  Multidimensional array here. We will receive the field data in the addimgck.php file. The file addimgck.php  will use php multidimensional array and we will use array display techniques to know the input fields for file upload. Please ensure that write permission is given to the directory where files are to be stored. ( Here the directory name is upimg )

while(list($key,$value) = each($_FILES[images][name]))
{
if(!empty($value)){   // this will check if any blank field is entered
$filename = $value;    // filename stores the value
$add = "upimg/$filename";   // upload directory path is set
//echo $_FILES[images][type][$key];     // uncomment this line if you want to display the file type
// echo "<br>";                             // Display a line break
copy($_FILES[images][tmp_name][$key], $add);     //  upload the file to the server
chmod("$add",0777);                 // set permission to the file.
}
}


As this script allows more than one file to upload so this script is likely to take more time than normal execution time. So it is better to set a higher value to manage maximum script execution time for this script.
Download the ZIP file here  php_multi_file_upload.zip

Discuss this tutorial at forum

Reading from local and remote files by using fopen() Writing to a file by fwrite() function unlink:Deleting file by using unlink function Deleting all files present inside a directory Downloading files using header control File upload to server using PHP File upload using PHP 5 and register_global off Uploading More than one file to server Displaying all files and directory of a folder Getting the Present file name running the PHP script Getting the last updated time of the file in PHP Displaying the last modification time of the file Searching for text within a pair of tags of a html page Listing All title tags inside a directory