Hi Phil,
Personally, I think the Web Photo Gallery feature of PS CS2 works quite well for slideshows, and the Flash gallery template has met my needs when I don’t need something highly customized, which I’d just do myself.
As for quality, if you intend to be presenting images as you currently are, I definitely think you need a slideshow style of presentation. Having multiple large images on a single page is so doggedly slow to load that I gave up waiting on the 16 Oct 2006 soccer photos that I randomly chose to look at from your site. Admittedly, our network at work today seems a bit sluggish with web browsing, but the bulk of the slowness was due to the number of large photos on a single page. One image that I saved, revealed that it was about 330KB and 2000×3000 pixels! All you had done was scale it in HTML to fit on a typical monitor, which buys nothing in terms of apparent on-screen image quality.
If high quality 5×7-inch images are desired so that others can save them and print them out, I suggest you take the following approach although it will still be a little unwieldy in requiring some manual editing labor (perhaps others know of a program that will do all this for you):
Using Web Photo Gallery, generate a gallery whose main images are on the order of 500×750 pixels, and specify a JPEG quality of 8 for what should be quite nice quality on a monitor. Now, let’s assume a viewer is browsing your images on a 17" diagonal, 1280×1024 flat panel. At those dimensions, the effective resolution of the sceen on the diagonal is 96 ppi….let’s just call it 100ppi for the sake of easy math. Your 500×750 pixel images would be roughly 5×7.5 inches viewed on such a screen.
When the gallery is generated, the main images will have been generated at 500×750 pixels and with a JPEG 8 quality, perhaps around 120KB in size using the image I chose as a reference point. So, you’ve got images about 1/3 the file size that will be much faster to load when browsed.
Once you’ve generated your gallery, you will have a folder of images and one of thumbnails. If you ignore the Flash option and go with an HTML slideshow, you can set up each main image to itself be a link to a high-resolution photo for your viewers to save if that is your actual intent. Just create a 3rd folder perhaps called "prints" and save the full-resolution images there with high quality JPEG compression along the lines of what you’re currently using. Then, for each "print image" in that folder, link the corresponding "slideshow image" to it. Your viewers can then open that image if the choose, or simply save it locally to print out.
Although not an auto-advancing slideshow, I once put together a web gallery of images of my sister’s artwork that follows along the lines of the approach described here. If you visit <
http://www.ambress.com/debbiemartin>, you will find that each main image will link to a larger hi-res version, while the thumbnails in the left frame simply provide a way to manually choose the images of interest.
Hope that helps,
Daryl
