Bulk image upload with captions

Hi,

I’m interested in using wordpress to publish plots I make in my research to share with a limited set of collaborators. I want these to be visible to only authorized visitors to my site. Each plot has a caption with it that contains information about what parameters were set when producing the plot.

I was wondering if there is any way to automate this? I’d like to upload a set of plots (.png files usually) with caption metadata, probably in a separate text file (I can make this file any format necessary), and to have it all appear on the post automatically. I’ll often post 30-40 plots, so I don’t want to hand do much of this. I searched awhile for a plugin for this, but its hard to figure out if any of them could be configured for something like this, so I was hoping for some expert advice. I’m pretty new to wordpress and web stuff in general.

The alternative I’m considering is to put the pictures at a known URL, and automatically generate the html of the post, with <img> tags pointing to the external URL. The problem here is that I don’t think that the external URL could be password protected and allow for wordpress to access it, so this method wouldn’t keep the images very private. I’d prefer to actually store the pictures in wordpress, where I assume they’re safe from snooping until we’re ready to publish. If someone knows a way around this problem, this would be an acceptable method to do things.

I want the plots to be fairly large and readable. I don’t want them small thumbnails.

Any suggestion on how to do this would be appreciated. Thank you!