the reason that I use the id field is that the client wants a slide show with next,prev and exit buttons. the only way that I could figure out how to do this is passing the id for an image in an hidden field and incrementing or decrementing the id field to point to a previous or next image to be displayed. if there is a break in the id number sequence the code barfs. if I could pass id numbers that don't exist I could make the delete image option that the client wants.