Collection website help

[nkdbacks]

I've been toying around with websites for a while now, but wanted some advice. Any help from you player/team collectors would be great.

I'm hoping to do a website that is a museum of sorts for my collection - pictures (not huge images, bigger than thumbnails but still pretty tiny) of my entire collection from base cards to 1/1, which is currently sitting at around 8,300 cards. So that would be 8,300 images plus (in theory) the back of the card, so over 16,000 images.

Is this just an unreasonable expectation? I was building it on Weebly with about 6 different pages that would have maybe 1,500-2,500 images per page, but I'm only at 100 images on some pages and the page loads completely within about 10 seconds, which is already significantly slower than the 2 seconds or so it was before I added all the images. So I can only imagine as I approach 2,000+ that it will just not load in any reasonable amount of time.

Is it just not feasible to have that many pictures? I'm looking to avoid things like photobucket, as I don't think it's very pretty, and use an actual website like Weebly/webs, etc.

 

[mrdallas]

I bullt a site on Wix, with about 3000 images on it right now. And unless you pay for the premium site, It will just be a slow load time IMO. I am not sure if paying for the premium will help either. y site is also a very slow load time. Sorry, probably not much help LOL

 

[gracecollector]

If page load is your primary concern, do small thumbnails on the main page that are linked to the larger card image.

2000 full size images per page is unreasonable. I try to keep my pages to under 200.

Looking to do something like this?
http://www.markgrace.com/maingallery.html

 

[sschauer]

I do site 8000 images or so split into categories but with thumbnails and a fast hosting plan no problem. Key is to have small thumbnails and pagination I only load I think 30-40 per page so not a problem. I'm a profession programmer so I gravitate to custom backend but was using Arles Image Explorer to make the webpage and thumbnails for me for a long time was not very expensive to register and does an excellent job. My site now runs front end of Joomla and backend doing most of the webpage through laravel and my database but that is a big step unless you are a programmer.

 

[nkdbacks]

That's what I figured, thanks guys!

I think it may just be a little too ambitious as I'm not willing to pay for anything at the moment, and to break it out into that many pages just seems pointless, I wouldn't want to scroll through that many different pages on a navigation bar, especially just to see some base cards. Even if I broke it down into years and eliminated the back of the card scans, some years ('03, '04, '05 mostly) would still be over 1,000 images each. I'll experiment with a few other ideas but I think without paying I'm not going to get much.

 

[nkdbacks]

If page load is your primary concern, do small thumbnails on the main page that are linked to the larger card image.

2000 full size images per page is unreasonable. I try to keep my pages to under 200.

Looking to do something like this?
http://www.markgrace.com/maingallery.html

But yes, your website is always the first that pops to mind.