Best way to implement a photo gallery for google SEO?

[smithaa02]

Will be adding a new photo gallery here shortly to our main established website (~500 range with titles and descriptions...local legit historical stuff that people and hopefully google finds interesting).

With nothing set in stone our options are somewhat flexible at this point...is there a best way to go about this?

Image SEO while nice is strictly secondary.

Was thinking to do a master category page...would link to secondary page with thumbnails and title descriptions...then each thumbnail would link to a picture page with title, photo and roughly 2 sentences of relevant content.

Worries are...:

Would a structure like this lose too much page juice (lots of links to get to one picture page)?

Should I ax a search and cross category options to ensure no duplicate content?

We have a money keyword 'blue widget'...how beneficial would it be to start each image with blue-widget (eg blue-widget-eastside-1898.jpg). Would it be stuffing...? Google images LOVES keywords in the image file name but I don't want to over do it.

Should my image files be buried in keyword rich subdirectories? /images/blue-widget-history/blue-widget-acme/blue-widget-antenna-1923.jpg? Or are short urls best to concentrate the keyword density in the URL?

Same deal with the image category pages and the image pages themselves? Short efficient URL's or keyword rich URL's?

Would prefer to create all pages at once...does google see this as spamish and would see a rollout of 500+ picture pages as being spamish/unnatural? Would a phased in implementation be better?

On say a thumbnail page...how careful would I have to be about image titles? Avoid duplicates? Avoid keyword stuffing because it lacks the diluting power of contextual sentences? Pretty important that each page title itself be unique (no duplicate meta page titles)?

Would two sentences (it would be legit) of content for each picture page be enough to avoid a 'thin content penalty'?

The website is probably around 500 pages now...50 being strongly structured and the rest somewhat sparse on unique content. Would a huge influx of 'somewhat thin' pages likes photo gallery pages really water things up and lower certain averages google uses to determine your site quality?

Is one page per image a bad idea even if content is there? Would it be best to put a massive amount of written content and thumbnails on just a few pages (with linkouts to the bigger images)?

Any other suggestions/ideas would be appreciated!

[tedster]

Wow, you certainly did ask a lot of questions. I'll start with three answers/opinions.

Should I ax a search...

No, but implement it in a way that the search results pages are not indexed, or ideally now even crawled.

Should my image files be buried in keyword rich subdirectories? /images/blue-widget-history/blue-widget-acme/blue-widget-antenna-1923.jpg?

Overkill, IMO. keyword-in-filepath is not that big a signal today, so forget the long keyword stuffer directory names.

does google see this as spamish and would see a rollout of 500+ picture pages as being spamish/unnatural?

No - not at all. 500,000 at once, maybe.

[deadsea]

Would a structure like this lose too much page juice (lots of links to get to one picture page)?

I know you said that image search ranking is secondary, but here is what you need to rank an image in image search:

1) Keywords used for the image. Text directly before or after the image is associated most with the image. There should be minimal markup between this text and the image. Alt text and image file name keywords also count somewhat.
2) Size of the image -- bigger is better. Google uses the euphemism "image quality", but as far as I can tell, quality just means bigger. I'm not sure if they have fixed it, but it used to be that images that were too big to fit on the screen (and therefore unusable by users and too big to download quickly) had an advantage even over full screen (wallpaper) sized images.
3) Pagerank of the page on which the image is located or linked. (The "or linked" is very important. You can link to an image to get it to rank rather than showing on a high pagerank page. You can even link directly to a large jpg file, but use js on the link so that users see the same large jpg in the context of a more usable photo gallery)

Your gallery pages are going to be too far removed from high pagerank pages to rank the images effectively. You can still have this structure and rank images. You will need to link to the large sizes of the best images from more prominent places on your site.