I'm designing a web site for some of my travel photos, and I'm wondering how I
should design the pages that show the thumbnails. I would like to show
thumbnails as well as descriptions for each picture.

On all the photo sites that I've seen, if a page has thumbnails AND
descriptions, then it's done in one of three ways:

1) the page just shows all the thumbnails, and in order to see a description,
you have to move your mouse over a thumbnail, and a "tooltip" will appear with
the description (this is done by using either the ALT or TITLE attribute,
depending on the browser)

2) the page consists of a bunch of "rows" going down, with one thumbnail per
row. Each thumbnail appears on the left side of a row and has a description
to the right of it.

3) the page consists of a bunch of "rows", but there might be 3 or possibly 4
thumbnails per row. Underneath each thumbnail is a description.


I would prefer not to use method 1, as I would like all of the descriptions to
be visible on the page. I would also like to just set the ALT attribute to
"thumbnail" instead of the description, which might actually be fairly long.

I'd also like my thumbnails to be pretty close together and all visible at the
same time (assuming there aren't too many), so that rules out methods 2 and 3.

So I've come up with my own design, which I haven't seen on the web. I'm
going to have my thumbnails in rows, with as many thumbnails as possible in
each row. Each thumbnail will also have a number next to it. Then right
below all of the thumbnails will be the descriptions. Here is an example of
what it will look like:

http://home.comcast.net/~delerious1/test13.html

So if you look at a thumbnail and want to know what the description is, just
look below all of the thumbnails and find the number of the thumbnail (which
will probably be bolded so that it's easier to find). Oh yeah, my example
page isn't set up for it, but you will be able to click on each thumbnail,
which will take you to another page with a larger version of the image and the
same description that appeared on the thumbnail page.

What do you think of this design? Is it OK, or would you be annoyed at
looking at a thumbnail and then having to move your eyes to the bottom of the
screen to find its description? Any other problems?

Thanks for your input.