How I can access resources of local filesystem and manipulate them from browser

Question

I need a technology to:

a) From the a browser, a web page, browse to the user filesystem (with his authorization)
b) Let user select a folder and se

Answer 1

Since you're already up on Java technologies, if you're happy to require that the end user have Java I'd go with a signed Java applet. You can use Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) for the image manipulation.