AJAX Image Viewing

I can't seem to find something that exactly fits what I'm looking for so I figured I'd ask incase someone else has already made the modification I'm looking for or I just looked right over it.

I'm looking for a theme/module/hack that will use AJAX to navigate through images when viewing them. The framework for this is part of the Slideshow component use on Pedro Gilberto's website (http://www.pedrogilberto.net). When you are viewing in slideshow mode, you can click a next arrow and the next image and it's meta data (name, description) is updated on the page without having to reload all the other items on the page.

If the existing component would update the URLs automatically, I could probably even hack it to do what I want. Eg. When a user clicks on a thumbnail of an image, it would open the full image with "slideshow" enabled, but paused.

Facebook just recently added this to their site and I've noticed a HUGE decrease in the amount of time it takes to click through images and I'm sure it's reduced the load on their servers. This kind of module/hack simply makes sense for an application like gallery2 as it increases the performance (speed) of the software.

For whatever reason, I dont think Firefox wants me to post this message. I just typed up a full response twice and each time the browser crashed when I was adding the final details. I'll keep this post shorter and to the point and add details as necessary later.

If you have a facebook account log in and look at any album (album.php?aid=...) then look at any photo within this album (photo.php?pid=...). From here, click on the photo (to move to the next image) or click on the Prev/Next link to navigate. You'll notice that the image and supporting metadata (title, album, comments) refreshes without the whole page (layout, css, ads, navigation) having to refresh.

This significantly decreases the amount of time loading each image as instead of having to completely load all the other supporting items (~7.11s) you simple load the next photo and meta data (~500ms) directly into the current framework. This makes sense for navigating multiple pictures as all the framework should all stay the same based off the template and the only thing that should change is the actual content. Obviously when you go from one structure to another (eg album->photo) the page and template will need to reload, but within the same structure (eg. imageA->imageB) you shouldn't need to reload everything.

It does have some of the features I want, but I think it's less user friendly than a simple theme like Matrix or Siriux are. For example, if a user wanted to send a link to the photo they are viewing they would typically just copy the URL from the address bar, but they wouldn't be able to do that with Ajaxian. I really am not looking for anything fancy in the design or special effects in the theme. It could really just be the same basic layout that Matrix or Siriux has with a modification to the photo.tpl file with javascript calls to update the divs (perhaps by class or id) based on a next/previous link/action being clicked.

Facebook seems like they did it in a pretty genius way as the links still work (degrade) fine if javascript is disabled in the users browser. Based on the way the template system is setup, I dont think this would really be hard for someone that knows javascript. I just don't know enought about Javascript to get it done.

For example, everything in the photo.tpl in Siriux is classed well - aside from the photo title h2 which could be fixed pretty easy. Someone would just need to code a js file that would handle calls to (trigger on) links to other photos, then get the information (photo, title, etc) and dynamically load it into the classed divs.