[TYPO3-UG UK] Help and advice for beginner: Image captions, image display and Lightbox2

[Alan Ansell]

Hi all,
I'm hoping someone can help me. I feel that my difficulties are
not that I'm trying to do anything inherently difficult, more
that I don't know exactly where to look to configure the options
I need.
To try to explain briefly: I am a professional artist and I am in
the process of setting up a website to display my paintings. I'm
pretty new to typo3 and I've been following the documentation and
examples offered in order to build a template, edit the script
and generally find my way around typo3, while coming to
understand the enormous flexibility of approach. However, I have
some specific details that I just can't seem to find an answer
to. Having been pleased with my first efforts to build the basic
pages and content, and to now control almost all aspects of
layout from within css (how cool is typo3?) I come to the real
heart of my site, which is the display of images of my paintings.
What I have been doing up until now is to set the page content
element as "images" and to simply upload as many images as I wish
(I am trying to also work out how to enable scrollbars within the
dynamic content table to handle the overflow but that's possibly
a separate issue). I have installed and enabled the lightbox2
plugin, so what I currently have is a 'default' arrangement of
images, with borders and spacing set from within the constants
editor, which open into enlarged images with Lightbox2.
However, there are some things I really want to be able to set
before I launch the site. I want to be able to include a caption
for each image on a page, rather than a single caption, and that
is not shown on the page content, but which is then displayed by
the default settings in Lightbox2. What I mean by this, is that I
would create a caption for each image that is essentially the
title of the painting, the size, medium and price so that when I
enable the "image set" flag for Lightbox, it will display the
full image details.
The second thing I wish to do concerns the display and layout of
the smaller images as the page content. I am fine with image
editing in general and can produce sized/scaled images for use on
my site to any size or format necessary. But due to the fact that
my canvas formats vary, the images do not conform easily (or at
all) to a standard set of sizes. This means that the default
image layout in typo3 gets displayed as a somewhat jagged
assortment of images on the page itself. I don't mind at all that
the images differ when they are displayed at larger size within
Lightbox2, but I think I saw something in the docs about being
able to crop the display of images (as distinct from the images
themselves) to fit a regular box, meaning that I could expect to
display orderly, regular boxes on the page of images which are
not necessarily the complete image but which do conform to a
nice, orderly layout.
I have tried various ways of going about this, including adding a
table element with html content in the table, I even tried adding
a plain html content element to the page and coding it all in
html - but I'm sure that's a bit mad. Is there a 'simple' way to
tell typo3 and Lightbox to conform to these fairly simple
requirements?
Sorry if this is a bit of a long post but it's not that I'm
expecting a complete "how to" - I'm pretty good at following
documentation  and am happy to experiment with
html/css/typoscript - but I'm hoping someone will be kind enough
to point me in a firm direction with regard to a solution.
Many thanks
Alan
-- 
  Alan Ansell
  aansell at fastmail.fm