Secure Downloads area

Hi Guys, I am a fairly competent web designer and something of a novice web developer. If someone can help with thsi I’d be most grateful.

A client I have made a website for has now asked for a secure area where they can upload files/folders of images pdfs and their distributors can browse and download. I think a big stumbling block will be that my client wants to use their entire image libray (900mb).

To be honest I’m a little stumped where to start so any help would be great.

Cheers

As far as I know the only way you can ensure that anybody can’t download a file is to store the files above the ‘public_html’ folder. Then to allow certain people to download the files you can use something like this: http://www.ryboe.com/tutorials/php-headers-force-download to force the download.