Don’t know if you can get a whole folder at once, but you can definitely automate getting the files if you have access to the names. once you have the files it’s pretty easy to populate a dropdown menu with the names, then [prepend] the local filepath to the images so they can be loaded up.
Probably you could skip a step and do a [prepend prefix] to a umenu that accesses the files remotely, I’m not sure. Try doing this locally to see how it works with a folder of files (if you haven’t messed with this feature yet), then see if you can do it remotely, it might be possible. I’m sure it would work with a shared/mounted drive, but via FTP access I don’t know… maybe you could work with it somehow.
For another angle, dig into [jit.str.regexp], there’s a cool example subpatch which shows how to grab all the images off a webpage (like a Google Image search) and store them locally. Again, once you’ve done this, a umenu to access them (and send random index numbers to the umenu for display) is easy.
