Surely not! A CSS only gallery. "It can't be done" I hear you harrumph!

It bloomin' can and Stu Nicholls was the man to do it.

OK, there may have been others but his was the one I found and it looks might impressive. He also admits he had some help from the guys at htmldog (a demo of their drop down menu system is also available), but this is no mean feat.
Stu has taken it one step further by subsequently removing the javascript from it all and making it pure CSS!!!!!

Just take a moment and absorb that - it is good for you - otherwise there is a danger of becoming blissed out on too much of a good thing.

And one more deep breath ..... in through the nose and out through the mouth...... good, thats better isn!t it. Now we can go on and look at what Stu has done.

Essentially, Stu has taken the concept from the CSS dropdown menus and gone that extra step and come up with a 3 step gallery.
From his site:

A three step photographic slide show that works in IE6, IE7, Firefox and Opera v9.01 and probably a few more (can be made to work in IE5.5 with box model hacks).

The first step is to hover your mouse over the miniature images and see a x4 magnified image.

The second step is to move your mouse towards the x4 image to see it replaced by a x16 full size image.

Finally, move you mouse onto the full size image to see a pop-up description of the image.

Anyway - on with the demo:


As an extra note, Stu does attach some terms and conditions to use of the technique, so please do go have a read before using the techniques here. (They are really not restrictive so do at least have a look).