How many pages per gallery?

Photockie

I'm restructuring my site and will probably change the number of galleries and sub-galleries. I'd like to "optimize" the size of the galleries so viewers aren't hit with 1,000 thumbnail pages or a single photo. This applies primarily to artistically oriented galleries. The documentary of the trip to grandma's house, of course, needs at least 100 pages to tell the full story.

What are your thoughts on how many pages feel about right in a gallery when you're checking out someone's work?

Somewhere between 1-3 pages seems about right to me. The closer to 1 full page of really good stuff, the better. Statcounter tells me the most common resolution viewing my site is 1024x768 (and it's also the smallest resolution I typically get). With my site design a gallery page on that size monitor there should be about 9-12 thumbnails.

The next most common resolution is 1280x1024 (and it makes up almost all the rest of the accesses). That's maybe 12-15 thumbnails. Bottom line I'm thinking somewhere between 9-24 images per gallery is a good target range. Thoughts?

jfriend

With many exceptions (depending upon what the viewer is trying to do), I figure the first page of images are going to get the most views (typically around 15 images), some viewers will get to the 2nd page and not that many viewers will get beyond that (in plain browse mode) unless they've decided they are specifically looking for something.

So, ideally you hook em on the first page and keep them interested on the second page. As I lay things out, that means you've got to get them pretty darn interested in the first 30 images. It doesn't mean you can't have more if the situation demands it, but don't expect them to find their interest on the 50th image. This is one of the reasons I often manually sort my images so the most grabbing ones are on the first page.