Pop-up pages 'on the fy' ?

[BootBoy]

I have an art gallery site with 100's of galleries of individual artist's work. Each artist's gallery has up to 100 thumbnails. I'm trying to find a script (perl/javascript?) that will automatically create either pop-up pages 'on the fy' or even layers, containing (only) the larger version of the thumb, 'onclick'. I don't want to use 'Open browser window' or 'swap image' or show/hide layers alone as the work involved would be huge and the pages verbose.

If anyone has come across an efficient way of doing this I would be very grateful. Note: Each artist has their own folder with identical stucture ie. index.htm and 2 folders, 1 containing thumbs and 1 with 'big pics'. All images are named 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg etc.

Thanks for your attention.

B