Use of tables in displaying thumbnail images

I'm not exactly sure when the change to using HTML tables in

displaying portfolio thumbnails took place, recently I believe, but

you all must have a luxuriously large monitor! One column of

thumbnails is largely cut off when I view a folder's index page on

my imac's 14" monitor.

 

While I can see why the change was made (neater, more

uniform arrangement of the thumbnails) it is unfortunate that

the tables can't accomodate different sized monitors, especially

those of the size impared.

It isn't so much the width of the monitor that is important but the resolution. The folder thumbnails are approximately 200 pixels wide and are displayed 4 across.

I understand the resolution vs size issue. My resolution options

are 800x600 or 1024x768, the latter of which results in

microscopically small text and windows on a 14" screen.

 

It had been my impression that most web page design

guidelines recommended a page width of 600... rules are made

to be broken, but this one seems to be pretty standard.

I guess there was an assumption made, right or wrong, that people who scan and edit photos on their computer usually run in at least 1024x768. I can't think of too many image management or editing tools that are very usable at 800x600. A preference setting to pick the number of columns of thumbnails to display would probably be nice. Just as 4 is too many on the many 800x600 displays out there (on low-end laptops and so on), I'll bet some of the 1600x1200 set would like to be able to show 6 or 7 thumbnails across.

 

1024x768 is just barely usable for the likes of Photoshop and the venerable Paint Shop Pro. And completely inadequate when viewing things on photo.net that insane people upload at 2048x1536. (Hey, Phil! I'll just bet you're handy enough with math to be able to set a fixed contsraint for the "medium"-res images just like is done for the thumbnail--or even better, a preference to let users pick a constraint for the size they want the mediums to be shown at, and just have the system calculate the height and width attributes accordingly).

I don't like the fixed 4-cell-wide tables either.

 

It means that somebody running at 640x480 or 800x600 (a lot of web kiosk and portables still do!) has to do a lot of horizontal panning to view the images. On the other hand, somebody with a super resolution of 1600x1200 will only see 4 thumbs accross (what a loss of space).

 

The new thumbnail system is just _not_ using the available resources of the client.

 

The solution is very simple: _don't_ use a table, the browser will use its own "intelligence" to position the images (like it does with regular tekst = auto wrapping).

 

I like it the way it was before: no table and let the browser do the wrapping.