Ehhh, I warned you I'd be posting a lot ;-)

And Amanda's bunnies really do rock.

A site that's going to eventually load 365 thumbnails is going to be no friend of anyone. Not you, paying bandwidth bills, not happenstance visitors, waiting for your server to shoot out 365+ files to construct the page, etc.

Think about using a different organizing principle besides chronological date display. Feed people the last photo, and links to the rest. Make a better page to set the whole thing in. Size your photos with some consistency, so they don't break your design.

A site that's going to eventually load 365 thumbnails is going to be no friend of anyone.

...

Size your photos with some consistency, so they don't break your design.

Great suggestions...

I've been kind of keeping to 100 pix width (except in odd cases where the height is more than the width), but I've thought of cutting that to 50 pix.

I'd just LOVE to see 365 thumbs on the same page.

Maybe one month per page?

I'd do the whole thing on a Blogger 'blog, but, again, I want design the page(s) as massive amounts of little thumbs that hopefully intrigue you into going clicky clicky clicky... That's what I'm hoping for...

(That shd be "I want to design the page(s)..."

Sleepy bye soon...

Have a look here for some CSS / DHTML tricks that might give you some ideas.

The title attributes are limited to 75 characters in Firefox, and I suspect had a shorter limit in older gecko-based browsers, but I might be wrong about that.

I was going to suggest ordering them by weeks to cut down on the number of images, but on preview, yeah months should work too.

The title attributes are limited to 75 characters in Firefox...

Thanks! That was roughly my guess, since I used to surf MeFi mainly at my old cubicle job where I was forced to use IE. Now of course I'm on FF at home.

"I want design the page(s) as massive amounts of little thumbs that hopefully intrigue you into going clicky clicky clicky"

shane, speaking for myself, NO. I clicked on the link and as soon as a whole bunch of very tiny thumbs came up I was zoning out.

A few big thumbs that show me something. Anything. Please.

The page full of tiny pics just sort of says bad porn site to me. Sorry.

Do thumbs about flickr size or larger and have them stacked one above the other. Do no more than your server can load in 3 seconds or less with the top pic loading up in under a second.

Another couple of sites to get inspiration from perhaps, here and here.

To me (not a designer), the current layout is neither fish nor fowl. You have lots of thumbnails that will annoy people for whom not having the entire page load in three seconds is a pain (ie most people), but doesn't have a "cool factor" to let people get over that.

What I would love to see would be tiny thumbnails that are all the same size and butted together to (particularly once there are a lot there) make a kind of patchwork quilt look. I would do a kind of cropped thumbnail with the most intriguing part of the photo showing, with a link to the full-size image (well, duh).

For the layout you have, I think you need to at least make the thumbs the same height, because it looks pretty untidy the way it is.

GeckoDundee, maybe I have just aged out of the target demographic but both those site are examples of things that trigger the 'yawn, whatever' response in me. Trying to cram too much into too small a space. It just says this stuff is not very good but if I spray enough on a page maybe something will stick.

Still, many folks have made lots of money using magazine ads that cram tons of small print and/or pictures on a page so while I don't respond to it maybe it works.

And, dg's patchwork quilt idea with (larger) cropped thumbs idea could be very cool. Maybe a three by three square per page so that the quilt is 960x720?

The point about making photos all the same size is a good one. One way I've dealt with that in the past was to use "photo mounts". That way each thumbnail takes up a uniform amount of space on the page, even though they're different sizes.

I don't know if I'm explaining that well, but I was planning on doing something similar tomorrow anyway, so I might post an example later.

On preview, yeah, arse-hat, I hear you, but I was thinking of the technology rather than the use it's put to in those examples. Really, I was just thinking of ideas for how to set out photos using CSS. I don't know if shane's a big fan of CSS, but if he is, there's some stuff there to hack.

GeckoDundee, maybe quilts via css?

The problem I would foresee with quilts would be positioning on the page (especially as we're talking about a collection that changes on a daily basis). CSS would indeed be an obvious technology for dealing with positioning / layout problems.

Hmm. I can feel some experimentation coming on...

The point about making photos all the same size is a good one. One way I've dealt with that in the past was to use "photo mounts".

Would it be too much work to crop the thumbs down to a uniform square size, while leaving the full-size image in it's original shape?

THANKS, all. EXCELLENT feedback. Very very cool.

The page full of tiny pics just sort of says bad porn site to me.

I thought bad pron sites made the Intarweb go 'round?
;-)

Okay, here we go with a few splash photos, a new idea for thumbs (a la Flickr?) ... I'd thought of the "photo mount" thing but didn't feel like bothering ... But that or cropping the center or focal point of photos to uniform sizes is an excellent idea.

THANKS again. I never seem to get the kind of creative feedback I want on the Web, but you guys rocked out here.

Maybe I'll just go with Flickr or a 'blog. Professional projects have shown up on Flickr before. Or is that just all n00b of me?

What about the damn photos themselves? Is the project worthwhile?