Better way to upload images to Media Library?

[btickler]

Ok, there is probably some easy answer to this...but I have been using the media library to upload images (you need to upload them that way instead of FTP to get the automatic thumbnails created and the SmushIt plug-in to work, right?) and I am using the "browser" option since flash was not working that well...but loading the images one at time without being able to select several is very time consuming ...and even viewing the media library is getting to be very time consuming at 7 pages.

Is there some plug-in that people are using that makes this more robust? Or are they just FTPing and then triggering the additional image creations and SmushIt some other way? I know I can compress them by hand, but I don't see any way to create all the other image sizes that are automatically set up.