Way to display a single photo, but with context?

Hi all...

I'm looking for a way to address the issue that Marco
talks about [thread=80976]here[/thread], and that I complained about [thread=1731]here[/thread]:

- Randomly featured photos for categories and galleries are cool. They draw the eye to a category or gallery.
- These random photos may also make us think, "Oh yeah, that's a cool photo, but I can't remember out of 600 or 6000 photos in the "Cool Stuff" category what gallery it was in.

The problem is, even if you right-click and save that image, or drag it to your desktop to get the image ID, there doesn't seem to be a way to find the context (gallery) of that image.

This kind of sucks. At the same time, my earlier proposal that clicking on a thumbnail would take you to that image in context does kind of fall apart when you're talking about categories.

So I thought of another solution: just clicking on a thumbnail by default would take you to the category, or to the first page of a gallery. HOWEVER, maybe a Javascript rollover (I know, like SmugMug needs any more danged JS rollovers :-/) could pop up after a 2-3 second hover over the image, and give you the options to:

a) View this category/gallery
b) View this photo

I even wonder if this could be done as (god help me) a JS+CSS hack.

But the fundamental problem remains. I can't think of a way to get a single image to show up, but retain a link back to its parent gallery.

Popular photos *kind* of works, in that the link only contains the image ID:
http://www.smugmug.com/popular/today/1/244706810

See how the page has that link: "see photo in gallery"

That's what I'd love to have random thumbnails link to.

But I don't know. Maybe this is a lost cause. :-{