I am posting in this forum because my site is in HTML. I am thinking of adding a slideshow using either PHP or JS.
I found a couple of pretty nice slideshows in this great post by LadynRed - http://www.webmaster-talk.com/websit...galleries.html

I have been a professional artist for all of my adult life, but this is my first website. I had no previous knowledge of code or any aspect of web design. I just decided to build a site and have been learning a little at a time. Now I am at a crossroads and would like to make some improvements using features I am unfamiliar with so, naturally, I have a couple of concerns.

I am in the process of naming my image files with SEO in mind as well as their alt attributes.
At this point, I have conventional thumbnails pages, each one clickable for a larger view. If I make the change to a slideshow presentation will I lose the SEO benefits that these file names (hopefully) generate?

I would also like to ask if my images will still show up on an image search.

There are 2 slideshow scripts that I like -
The first is at http://minishowcase.net
The second is at http://smoothgallery.jondesign.net/

As long as the images are viewable in the source of the page, the images will be viewable by search engines. (doesn't matter if the HTML is generated by PHP).

If the images are generated by and inserted with JavaScript, they won't be viewable in the source, and will be considered to be absent by search engines. This does not mean that just because JavaScript is used, that the associated content is invisible, because JavaScript can be used to manipulate already existing HTML elements, which would be considered "static" and hence viewable by search spiders.

By the way, the names of the images won't matter a lick as long as you include an alt attribute. The name of an image is only a fallback to identify it, if no alt attribute is present.

Since you DO want your images to be searchable and show up on the search engines, then I'd go with SmoothGallery from JonDesign. Why ? Because the image link, it's title, etc. are IN the HTML, the gallery effects are created with javascript.

Minishowcase, on the other hand, does NOT put your images in the html, so there's nothing for a search engine spider to find.

Thanks alot!

You can always put an alt tag to each image and teh same page title if possible

You can always put an alt tag

There is NO SUCH THING as an alt "TAG" - it is an ATTRIBUTE - and that is NOT what it was intended for. Using the TITLE attribute would be better.