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We have played with it a fair bit in some different photo layouts and tracked the results (as accurately as we can).

We've found that with the first of these two layouts the first photos that are shown (pre-carousel) are seen far more often than the others.

This leads me to believe that users aren't using the next/prev buttons on the enlarged images, but are closing and cherry picking thumbnails based on what they see. The second layout tends to get far more views because it shows all the photos at once (we've played with hiding some and doing "Show More" which didn't have a negative impact either, since they had to click "Show More" before viewing thumbnails). The other problem with the first option is that it pushes far more content "below the fold", however we really couldn't find any data to support the fact that this was an issue - having the photos up top and prominent did help increase from the engagement they had on photos before.

I think that lends some support to the theory that carousels are less than ideal - I don't have the actual firm numbers anymore but the team built a tracker that used javascript and large image load tracking to determine which photos were and were not being loaded.

My summary: there's so many factors to explore when it comes to photos that I don't think we'll ever be done trying new things.

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