• Alternatives to FrontPage Galleries
• Photo Galleries for Dreamweaver

• Thumbnail size – You know what your photographs look like but can anyone else really get a good idea if you use tiny thumbnails. I’ve seen sites that use blurry thumbnails (often too small) that look a bit better when the mouse rolls over them. What’s the point? Don’t we want our viewers to actually see our work? At 75 pixels wide, do you really have a good idea of what this photo is showing?

75 pixels	100 pixels	150 pixels	200 pixels - click on this one for the larger version.

• Placement of thumbnails – along the side, top or bottom or in a table within the center of the page? Will the viewer have to do much scrolling, especially if their monitor is set at 800 x 600? People don’t mind so much doing vertical scrolling but don’t like horizontal scrolling. Before you can decide about the placement of your thumbnails you must also decide on the pixel width and height of the larger images. What monitor resolution are you hoping your viewer will have? Many don’t maximize their viewing area. Do banners etc. at the top of your page take up so much space that your photos are viewed too low on the page, therefore requiring vertical scrolling.
• How many thumbnails do you want to have showing on the initial page? Have they been optimized for optimum file size? Will the viewer have to scroll through them?
• How large (pixel size) is your larger version. Do you want most viewers to easily see the entire image? Hopefully so! I think my pet peeve about ‘gallery’ sites is that I have to scroll every larger version of the photos.
• How large is the file size of this image? Has it been carefully optimized so that it will load fairly quickly by people using a dialup connection.
• Many photographers seem to like to use black or very dark page backgrounds for their slide shows but fail to make text links readable. The viewer should not have to ‘mouse over’ text to see what it says!
• If the larger image is linked from a thumbnail to a separate page be sure that the default browser linking colors are not used. Use CSS to correct this mistake. Bright blue borders are very amateurish!
• Where will the larger image open – within a pop-up window, within a frameset or on a totally separate page? How will the viewer navigate back to the thumbnails? – your home page?
• Do you want your viewer to just choose separate images or do you more or less want to force them to see all the photos in a set. I personally like to do ‘compositional studies’ and would like my viewers to see them all. Here's an example.
• What additional information do you want to provide about your photo? Will it have a caption? Does the viewer really need to know the file name and/or the camera information?
• It is probably best not to use any graphics for background images on the gallery pages. They will only distract the viewer.

Eleanors Travels