image gallery issues

[wobbegong]

Hi.
I have a problem (obviously..)

I am making a php based image gallery. This is how it works: The pics is uploaded to a directory on my server, while it is being uploaded I also add certain information about the current pic in a MYSQL database (like size, name, description, path to where it is stored etc).

My problem is that I only want to print out a certain amount of images per page. I know that I could use LIMIT, but that is not enough.. In addition to wanting to limit the amount of images per page, I also want to set how many images that is printed out per row.. (example: five images per row, and then three or four rows down.. hope you understand).

I also have a question concerning thumbnails! Is there a way that I can create thumbnails, on the fly, so that I don’t have to store them on the server? Why, you may ask…? My thought is that every time you enter a page the thumbnails are automatically generated ( printed on the page), so that each user could set the quality of the thumbnails to fit their connection.. instead of me forcing poor low-bandwidth users to download huge thumbnails.

Hope you guys are able to answer some (or all 🙂 of my questions.

Thanx 😉

[Weedpacket]

Your first question can be answered by a search of the forums for the word "pagination". The second could probably also be answered by searching the forums for the word "thumbnail", but it's generally regarded as excessive server load to be generating them all the time; it's certainly possible - the code is virtually identical in the two cases, the only difference being when it's run - but it may be more efficient for you (and the site visitor) to offer a selection of sizes and pregenerate thumbnails at those sizes when the image is uploaded.