Your comments

This is definitely on the right track, though I feel that it might be nicer if the submission thumbnails are proportionate to their actual size rather than one square for everything. Weasyl had this problem and it was one of the more prominent complaints from regular users of that site, but that's been changed since then. Obviously having the square thumbnails makes the gallery in general "neat", but at the same time it kinda devoids it of any personality.