[thelist] best way to display lots of photos

[Birdie]

Hi,
I have a lot of old client sites (7 years+ !) up for total redesign.
These are sites like holiday villas which want to display a good  
gallery of what their accomodation looks like.

These old sites used thumbnails that linked to larger pictures or  
dhtml slide shows. But now we need a more elegant solution and one  
that complies with recent standards.

I'm looking for opinions on the best way to accomplish showing a lot  
of photos on such a site, but avoid it being a photo album.
I don't want to use flash and want a solution where people can  
control what they see, not just an automatic slideshow.

Is it good practice to still display small thumbnails so people can  
choose what they view?

I would love to see example sites and any links to software that we  
could use. I've been out of the web game a while and now its time to  
upgrade!

Our website is hosted on a linux server so we can not use  
anything .asp or .net.

Thanks in advance for any insight or advice.

Lisa