@ G'Kar: (Cool name by the way. B5 ftw ) To a certain extent the aspect ratios will be determined by the image themselves, but I'll take your advice and try and keep the longest edge around 600.

@ Gunsmoke: Sorry, I didn't make my question very clear. With the future project it will be an image gallery to showcase a portfolio of artwork, so probably not to sell (if I struggle with making pop-up images work, I shudder to think what shopping carts and secure transactions would do to me!).

While there may not be a lot of images, a portfolio does need to be regularly updated so I wondering what would be the best way to host the images. Would it be better to upload everything to something like S-Drive or would it be better to host the files externally (on flickr or similar)?

Because I know so little about webdesign and webhosting I thought I would ask the question of hosting a lot of images before starting to sketchout the site design. The way I figure it, if the images are the focus of the site it would be best to start with them and build the site around them, rather than building a site and trying to attach the images afterwards, if that makes sense.

Well, depending on what you decide for a host, most come with free utilities to display pictures. Or there are several free alternatives out there. Go to my website and drop me an email and I'll point you towards a good one I know.

That said, if you are just displaying, and not looking to sell, your photos then CoffeeCups Photo Gallery is pretty good. It's FLASH based but if you want to go HTML then host it on S-Drive and that will give you the option of having an HTML Photo Gallery that will work on all devices. Just depends on what you want as a host. S-Drive also has several other advantages, not to mention A1 support. Read about it here... http://www.coffeecup.com/sdrive/

Yes it's a good idea to have portfolio of your artwork. Many great designs start offline, so yeah sketching it out will be a great idea, I sketch stuff out, just to see where your going. Quite an exciting project you go there.

Oops forgot to mention, if you already have a Flickr account, don't know if your aware but as an alternative, again this is about choices and options, but they have a slideshow that you can just embed into your site.

Thanks a lot guys, I really appreciate you taking the time to help me out.

The portfolio project is a while off yet, but I certainly know where to come if I need assistance.