Should I switch from 20.000 pages pages to 500 pages

[karkadan]

Hi, I would like some input + tips.

I have a photo/image gallery site. My PR went from 5 to 3.

My site shows one page per image. So, if certain topic/user has like 200 pages, it generated 200 pages with unique titles and some descriptions.

Since my site grew popular, and I had PR 5, most pages were indexed, and I had very good rankings.

Now, site is PR3, people/sites leeching my images appear #1, sometimes people stealing my articles appear #1 on ranking. New content from certain topics seem hard for Google to notice.

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Should be wise to turn from 200 photo pages, to just 1 that shows the thumbnails and make the content appear on the same page (using AJAX)?

What will Google consider from the shrinkage?
With lesser pages, will my PR be better distributed?

I ask because I sense that everytime my site got bigger, it damaged my rankings. And with the lost PR, it damaged it a lot.

[signor_john]

I ask because I sense that everytime my site got bigger, it damaged my rankings. And with the lost PR, it damaged it a lot.

On the other hand, you've now got 20,000 points of entry to your site. Unless most of your users are arriving via the home page, why would you want to change that?

[creative craig]

Has your traffic increased/dropped? Or is it just your PR that dropped?

[karkadan]

My traffic decreased.
Main Page = PR3 (has 200 topics)
Topic Page = PR1 (30 photos or more)
Photo Page = PR0

Photo pages that used to have traffic has been dropped.
Any blog site or page leeching the photos from my site, appear on Google Images Search.

Topic pages still manage to be steady. Some photo and articles still bring traffic.

But I lost over 1/3 of my old traffic in the past 6 months.