I've been looking again at your beautiful photos Rudi. And I have been trying to formulate some response.
Obviously the web design is very fine. My only response there is that I have finally taken the 'next' step in the recent update of my own main Web page. I've done the 'Apple' thing and dropped off those who haven't kept pace with technology.
For some reason you have chosen 820x552 frame size, although the individual pics seem smaller than that. For my screen that is too small. I know there are many (like V) who are still on the old 640 screens, and many on the old 800 screens, but if we are to really share stuff across the internet, we have to finally leave the legacy systems behind - or so I argue.
The latest resolution for my Flash movies on my own site are now 1280x750, and the files are 700MB to 1Gb. If that is too much I direct people to my YouTube site. The Internet world is changing.
The majority of the pictures are 800x532, I'm not entirely sure why the height is so weird. I had a collection of random images, and some of them were cropped strangely. When I decided to create the galleries I resized them to fit a 800x600px box.
I'm not too worried because these are just a demo galleries. Once I have the website I will have some standard size. Though sometimes when I crop images I just ignore any common sense and stop worrying about the ratio.
Don't get your hopes high, probably I will keep the 800x600 size.
You cannot talk about picture resolution and bring up videos as an example.
Right now I have a 1366x768 resolution monitor. It is high resolution, but guess what? I cannot make the pictures large because it's a 16:9 monitor. I could make a 720p (HD) image if I had a standard 1280x960 (4:3) or 1280x1024 (5:4) monitor. But I can't. If I make the image 720px high, I have to scroll the browser window.
Watching your 1250x750 video is an entirely different scenario.
In 2010 the sale of portable computers surpassed those of desktop pc. 99% of the portable computers have a 16:9 ratio monitor, because they are optimized to watch videos on them. This means that there are more people with widescreen monitors then standard 4:3.
Look at all the pictures on your wall. How many are "widescreen"? Probably none. Because in the earlier days film cameras were taking 4:3 pictures, and so do the digital ones. Thanks to the cinema and video business, the pixels are growing but the screen real estate just shrunk a lot. Whenever I put a picture a wallpaper I have two black stripes on the edge. 16:9 sucks!
But regardless of the ratio, there is another trend. In a couple of years, you will be browsing the internet from your handheld device. Your tablet pc, smartphone, electronic paper device, whatnot. The screens on these are even smaller, and it is unlikely to have resolutions larger then 1024x768 (this is the 10" iPad now).
In the picture business it makes more sense having a small resolution gallery and point the users to the individual high resolution images, if they want to see them.
And don't even get me started with the Internet world. I am doing web design, I work in the headquarters of an phone carrier who is also ISP, and I am using a 64KB/s internet connection. Besides the design of the pages, I'm also in charge of content management - importing them from the providers into our database. So when Universal puts 2 TB worth of mp3's on our FTP server I just scratch my head, raise my hands and give up. It would take weeks just to download it.