Handling multiple file downloads from Amazon S3?

Question

I have a private bucket that stores full sized images for clients, all thumbnails and smaller sizes are on the webserver. When the user has multiple images they would like to download, I'd like to zip the aforementioned images, then deliver them as one file to the user.

Currently, the only way I can think of this happening is by transferring files to the web server from S3, zipping, then down to the end user.

It seems there could or should be a better approach to this. Any ideas or suggestions?

Answer 1

Have an EC2 instance to do this. Traffic between EC2 and S3 is free (and as internal traffic, much faster), so you wouldn't be paying for double the bandwidth as you would with an external server.

Answer 2

Apparently there are Actionscript libraries that allow this to happen client-side eg Fzip...Did you already find a solution?