advice on image galleris.

I’m really a complete newbie to wordpress, so I need some help. I’m afraid these questions will sound very basic.

My website is for a hand-woven rug project, so the heart of it will be images of rugs and their weavers. I need advice on the gallery settings.

On my rug gallery page, I used fullwidth masonry gallery. With choosing flexible masonry it seems like just four images fit across the page, regardless of the image size. I think it looks ok. But is there some way that I can fit more images across the page? The current images are 300 pixels in width, but I tried 150 pixel images and 575 pixel images and still the same number of images fit across the page (4). Can this be changed? If not, what is the best pixel width for images in this gallery?

Perhaps the most important pages of the site are the pages of each individual rug where there will be a complete image of the rug, and close-up images of it. I’m not sure the best way to accomplish display these images with all the different gallery options. On the page linked above, I used the standard gallery, with thumbnails below, no scaling on the gallery big preview image size (I used images 575×710 pixels). I tried different sizes for the thumbnails, but it did not seem to change anything. And because the images are already big, the lightbox option does not seem to make since. But maybe I should have smaller preview images and then use lightbox for closeups? I would appreciate any advice on how to best display the rugs taking in account loading time for the page, and ease of interface (which gallery settings to use, etc.).

There will also be pages for each weaver. I’d like to be able to have a small gallery of photos for each weaver. Which gallery options, if any, would create a similar feel to flickr or facebook or any general photo gallery where pictures can be both portrait and landscape, and possibly with different proportions, but they all still display without cropping? Any suggestions?

Thank you!