okay I'm writing a javascript thing to display all the pictures I got.
the thing works. I'm using an array to store the file names. the only
thing that annoys me about this is how much of a task this turns to
out be when adding a lot of new pictures.  I found a program that will
rename all the file names to numbers  such as:
0001.jpg
0002.jpg
0003.jpg
....
0124.jpg
and I figured well this will make things eaiser all I gotta do now is
have it use the counter value and slap on a ".jpg" to the end to get
the file name
except that has it trying to look for
1.jpg
2.jpg
3.jpg
...
124.jpg
and it of course doesn't find the picture, is there any way I could
convice Javascript to use a set number of digets?

this is some javascript code below, its a example to show you how to
set-up the numbers.

made a function that did what you want. and example just writes out
the number to teh website, but you can edit it to do what you need.

<script>
 
 function pad_zeroes (digits, n) {  // n is a string or number
   if(n.constructor == Number) n = n.toString();
   while(n.length < digits) n = "0" + n;
   return n;
 }
 
 


var temp_number = '';
for (var i = 1; i < 124; i++) {

// this is the number with zero padding
temp_number =  pad_zeroes(4, i) ;

// just a test writes out the number on to the webpage document so you
can see the number as it is made
// only intrested in the 'temp_number'

	document.write(temp_number + '<br/>');
}

</script>

<script  >
 
 function pad_zeroes (digits, n) {  // n is a string or number
   if(n.constructor == Number) n = n.toString();
   while(n.length < digits) n = "0" + n;
   return n;
 }
 
 

var full_numbers = '';
var temp_number = '';
for (var i = 1; i <= 124; i++) {

// this is the number with zero padding
	temp_number =  pad_zeroes(4, i) ;

// string with all numbers as one for testing only
	full_numbers  +=  temp_number + 'jpg, ';
}

// show alert msg for testing only
alert(full_numbers);
</script>

I don't know much javascript, but i did a  quick check and it does
seem that the string handling is a bit lame, so you probably do need a
custom function like define_web has posted.  Sad because something
like C, that has lame string handling, can do this with just
printf("%#.4d", <var>");