A Proper Web Photo Gallery

I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I’ve yet to see a photo gallery in a web page that I like.  The primary problems are:

1.  I don’t want to have to press the back button every time I look at a picture (like facebook, for example).  To that end, the whole gallery (thumbnails and full size images) should be contained on a single page.
2.  I want it to load fast.
3.  I want to have it look nice.
4.  Each picture should have room for a short description.
5.  It should resize to fill the browser window with thumbnails (so you can treat it much like a thumbnails view in Windows Explorer).

Rather than complain about it, though, I thought I’d make something I was satisfied with.  Well, I worked with my girlfriend to put one together (She’s learning HTML and needed a project).  Here’s a sample of how it turned out.
I used Highslide for the fancy javascript transitions.  It’s a really nice kit that plugs in easily.  The only issue I had with it was because I had defined a style for img elements.  The fix was to… not do that, define class that each image could use (for example class=”imgThumb”).
Anyways, this post is a heads up, because I wrote a tool to throw galleries like this together, and I’ll be posting it soon.  More about that when I get there.

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