Part of our business is creating, managing and optimising web sites, primarily on belf of Canadian lawyers and law firms. (and we do pretty much everything else in the world of public relations and corporate/firm communications.
Normally a web site is part of a program or plan.
And for everything we do, one of our first principles (First Principles used to be our consutancy's name) is:
What do we want our audience to do?
In your situation... you refer to "gallery."
For a lot of amateurs and, I would think also for current, retired or semi-retired professionals, a gallery showing past work is intended to display how talents were employed.
It's a computer-generated very of an art gallery or exhibition. It's for people to look at and enjoy
But if "gallery" in your case refers to pictures / reproductions that you have posted are part of a sales and promotion and marketing effort with goals of preserving or increadsing business,
A Wedding Gallery is to sell weddings. A Portrait Gallery is to get people to have portraits made. A Food Gallery may be to sell ingredients, or sell meals in a restaurant.
(I paused here and watched a documentary about Leonaro DaVinci, and realized I'm getting off topic. My apologies, but I continue on...)
A bit about SEO, Search Engine Optimization.
In most sites with a commercial purpose, site owners want people looking for their field of endeavour to find their site easily, before finding a competitor's site. Making your site easy to find is optming the site for search engines, such as Google.
Getting Google to put your site up high on the first page of the Google results is accomplished via Google's algorithm, partly by having visitors visit it for a long time, and go "deeper" into the site than just the opening, page, splash page, or the top portion of a long site.
Which brings us, partly to an answer to the original post.
Match the number of pixels to the horizonal width of the page, allowing for how you want the page layout to look, and anticipating what size and shape screen will be used.
Most often, screen width and height ratios are proportional and the software will adjust.
I start at 1920 x 1080 as a full screen size, and let software adjust, and I add 50% to make the automatic adjustments better quality.
In the next couple of paragraps, I write about designed pages, not rows of template-satisfying pictures.
So, for instance if I want a picture a full page wide, I'll size it 3ooo pixels across the top. And if below it I want two columns, one a third of a page wide and the other two thirds of a page wide, pictures for the first column would be 1200 pixels and for the second, 2400 pixels.
Photoshop Elements has a Save for Web feature that allows for lowering the quality so it is not visible on the screen, but makes the file much quicker to load than the full with highest quality original
LAYOUT ON THE PAGE
By laying out pages out like a magaze and adding interesting words, the viewer stays with the page longer, and can be nudged further into the site.
And the goal is CONVERSION. This is the stage where the viewer has been convinced by your pages viewed that there's some point in contacting the site owner.
Hope this was useful.
