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.