I have a developed PHP code to dynamically load files contained in a directory into a gallery / slideshow. I have many (40 - 50) of these gallery web pages which display images grouped by content. With hundreds of images, the dynamic gallery code allows me to add images to a directory without having to write code to each web page each time.
However I've realized that these files will be invisible to search engines since there isn't any HTML code to index on (e.g. the 'alt' tag). Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get these images indexed? Two ideas I've had:
1) Write a program to automatically generate a single web page for every jpeg file which will display the image when found with the search engine and contain a link to the gallery page where the user can see more content. The benefit to this method is not having to modify my live web pages. The downside is hundreds of additional files only to be found by a search engine.
2) Write a program to generate hidden links that can be pasted into my gallery html page - using the alt tag. The benefit to this method is that users would find my main gallery page with a search. The downside is having to cut and paste code to my live gallery web pages - defeating somewhat the purpose of a dynamic gallery.
I'm new at this, so any suggestions would be appreciated.
If I understand you correctly:
I would have one page that just lists thumbnails of pages, and then one page for each of the images, that shows a bigger version of each image, and all the meta-data you have. The best would be if you added a short unique snippet of text to each image, describing what in it.