i am desiging a web page that uses a data control to show a list of image galleries.  currently, i have it set up to where each gallery link (about 50+) on the page has an ajax modal popup and slideshow control associated with it.  what happens is, when someone clicks on the gallery link, the modal pops up and displays the gallery, so the gallery opens up in the same window without moving away from the current search page.

the problem is that when doing this, 50+ slideshows are setup, which takes a lot of server and client processing to handle.  also, when the slideshows load, they automatically download the first image in the gallery, which is a large-sized image.  my current setup is using a lot of resources, and doing a lot of work that may not be used (ie. people may not even view any galleryies for that page).

what i was wanting to do was to set up only one slideshow object per page, and have the gallery links load the correct images into that slideshow, which would heavily reduce the usage of both the servers and users resources.  the problem is, these things are done via ajax, so a page postback is not done, and my js/ajax knowledge is very limited, so i haven't been able to think of a way to do it.

any ideas on how maybe to do this?