User experience : make pagination depend on browser size

Question

I'm developping a fullsize photo gallery; by fullsize I mean its layout is meant to occupy 100% width of the browser.

Since my gallery will contain hundreds of pictures, it is paginated. The question I have is : how many pictures should I put in a single page since it depends on the window size ?

Have you ever seen a web application that fetches from server only enough data to fill a page without scrolling ?

I am not really asking for technical advise (not yet) but especially about user-experience. Does my idea make sense ?

Thank you

Answer 1

Sounds like you need to use to JS to determine the exact resolution that the user currently has then calculate how many images you can fit into that space taking into consideration margins etc..

To me that would be an awesome user experience if I got a gallery that took up 100% size.

Answer 2

I'd have the page initially load with a very small number of images (the minumum you'd ever expect to show at once) and then when the page loads use Javascript to determine the size of the screen and the number of additional images you can display and then load them via AJAX.

You could also detect the window being manually resized and add more items if it is made bigger.