IanW has been talking about different ways of using his blog to host his picture galleries. The original idea of having each picture be one post isn't working out too well, which makes perfect sense, especially from the point of view of storage and comments.

I like the idea of posting all the pictures together as one entry, then having the entry be included in a “pictures” category. The only thing really left is to have the “pictures” category page actually show the list of the galleries available, rather than the thumbnails. Then, when you click on a gallery, it shows the thumbnails. I guess if you had the category page show the descriptions, rather than the content, then you could give each gallery a description, and the body of the entry could be the thumbnail table. The problem I see with this is if you want your other categories to show the full content, rather than just the description. This would put a requirement out there to have the “category view” be configurable on a per-category basis.

I imagine this wouldn't be too difficult, although in dasBlog (which is what I use), there isn't really a category configuration option. Looks like something to add, maybe. I've look a bit into the code for categories, as I'm working on adding the ability to display multiple categories in one feed, and I think it would be feasible to make a couple small changes to include a category-level scheme for what to show on the entry list.

I'm thinking that I could change the item template to check to see if the item contains a certain category, then either display the whole entry or just the description. Hard-coding this will be easy, making it configurable will take a bit more thought.

The last hurdle I see with implementing this in dasBlog is having the item template adjust to show the thumbnail table if you click on the permalink to see the whole entry. I'm guessing that I could probably have a flag set to see how this is being rendered. I've only started thinking about the implementation details, so I guess I've got some more thought to put into it.

One of the original ideas was to have a separate blog set up for pictures, which would definitely make this a lot easier. Integrating it is a bigger issue. OmarS (the author of dasBlog) has a thread in his gotdotnet workspace's message board about integrating this functionality into dasBlog. I haven't really studied his final idea (extending the entry class to Picture), so I don't have too many thoughts, yet.