Rows and Columns of phtoo

I want to create a template, a system, where a video renders images in a folder ... in some number of rows and columns, in some area I specify, lets say the left side of the video, and each of the images fades in, one-by-one, left to right, row by row.

Is this something one could do in After Effects? ... or is Premiere programmable?

What I am trying to avoid is doing this manually ... it's fine if the images need to be in the media bin but I don't want to do them one at a time and I want to be able to create 'cropping boxes' with however many rows and columns and sizes and somehow designate them as being together and their ordering.

I saw this on a commercial and want to know if it's an Adobe tool I can use or was it some $100k+ piece of video-ware?