General Support: What do you think about the Plogger thumbnailing?

This sounds stupid, but I really like everything about Plogger, except for the way the thumbnails are shown. And now I would like to now how others think of it, because no one mentioned this before on this forum, so perhaps I'm the only one?

It's like this: The 'normal' thumbs (so NOT cropped) look sometimes awfull when an image (and therefore the thumb also) is really wide, and next to it is a tiny vertical thumb. Also the floating around the page causes it to be a little chaotic.

The cropped thumbnails look esthetic and evenly spread, but they are cropped. I have for instance some photos which look rather alike, with the main differences at the side of the images. The cropped thumbnails therefore will look allmost the same. Or for example a blackbird, filling the space of the image. The cropped thumbnail will be just plain black, because that's the middle of the image.

Also I think even sized thumbs make it easier to find images you've viewed before, instead of clicking all kinds of thumbs because they resemble the image you're looking for.

Personally I really would like to have this as a third option in displaying the thumbs. But how do others think about this?

The problems seems to be how to display them with pure css and without tables. I think it can be done with pure css (see an example I made: http://www.spoenk.nl/temp/test.html), although it will require some calculations within the loop to get the width and height of each thumb, necessary for the negative top and left margins.
On the other hand, it could also be done with tables. I don't mind. I really love pure css, but if a table is needed I don't mind.

Let's hear some opinions please?

The examples you give are of a system that Plogger also uses. When you don't fix the outer div (wrapper or container - div) to a certain width like 600px, but set it to 100% or auto, the div will be as wide as the page and the thumbs will float inside just like the thumbs in your urls.

Aside from my own example I also like your idea of making thumbnails myself, but although I'm not a php wizard, I wouldn't know if this can be done. Perhaps by first letting Plogger install all the images into its system, setting the thumbs at the same size as the larger images, then copy them back on your harddrive, making them to small thumbs like you would, changing no names, and then uploading them again, overwriting the original images. Also the re-thumbnailing feature should be turned off, but all this is an awfull solution.
Although, perhaps when the thumbnailing can turned off all together, you could make your own thumbs, sticking to the right names. Each error would therefore be visible in a crashing system or thumbs not showing up.

First, if you want to know what is actually going on with Plogger, check the nightlies. However, I haven't yet been able to upload the "new" tableless layout because I am in the process (this very moment) of converting my server from Win2k to Fedora 4, and can't commit it until I'm finished.

My interpretation of the float system is pretty rock-solid; it even provides space for captions and truncates them while keeping the float system intact. It has, however, only been tested on Windows. Further, Jack is right; if you want the gallery to resize, take off the fixed div around the thumbs. It might be inline, fyi.

A few more ideas, I want to try a display:inline or display:table-cell layout, but if you work with various browsers you will know what a task that is, because they don't implement them in a standard fashion. The benefit? The thumbnails could be centered, which right now they cannot. (Imagine a single thumbnail, and wanting that and others centered.)

I would also like to try a few things from another (and my preferred) CSS visionary, Stu Nicholls (www.cssplay.co.uk). However, you need the CSS (on occasion) to know the thumbnail size, and that would require parsing gallery.css in Plogger first, or forcing folks to manually edit their CSS (another bad idea). There are a few caveats involved, so while Mike and I have talked about it, it hasn't yet been tried.

Finally, if there is anything you wanted to try, the nightlies include a theme system, you could easily create one standalone and submit it for inclusion in Beta 3.

Regards,
Derek