First, the pros! The fun of having a gallery is 
to be able to say to people: "I just got [fill in 
cel description here]! Go see it!"  Another 
useful thing is that people learn some of what 
you're interested in - perhaps after visiting 
your gallery, they will e-mail you when they see 
something for sale that you might like. (Really, 
this happens! I've done it for other people and 
it's been done for me by other people. ^_^) 
Galleries can be a nice invitation to some 
wonderful private deals/sales. Also, depending on 
your ideas of amusement, it can be fun designing 
and putting a gallery together.

But there are some big cons to galleries. . . At 
the top of the list is image stealing. It was 
said in the message above this one and I'll say 
it again here: If you don't want other people 
taking the scans of your cels, you shouldn't post 
them anywhere. End of line.

Another big con to having a gallery (at least if 
you have cels of popular or rare characters) is 
having to deal with all the "offers". Take a look 
at the very noticeable message I put on the front 
page of my gallery regarding offers to buy my 
cels. You'd think people would get the idea, but 
they don't - I still seem to get at least one buy 
offer for every ten or so hits to the page.

A third big negative that not many people think 
of is: When you make an announcement about what 
characters you want and like, you can find 
yourself on the short end of the trading/buying 
stick when trying to get more cels of those 
characters. Especially when making offers on cels 
from other collectors who now know excactly how 
much you'd like the cel in question. . . For most 
people, there's too much temptation to take 
advantage. Example: I have a pan cel of Clary 
listed on my cel "Wish Page" as my #1 wishlist 
cel. If someone saw that and found that cel, it's 
almost certain they'll try to bankrupt me for it 
because they know they can, irregardless of how 
much or little it cost them to get the cel.

But, I do have a gallery. As for how I deal with 
the "cons" I listed -

A) My scans never show sequence numbers or 
registration holes and I never reveal sequence 
numbers to anyone. If someone does steal a scan 
of my cel, at least they won't be able to back up 
any claim that they own it.

B) My message on my page says it all about how I 
deal with buy offers on my cels. I almost always 
ignore them. Catch me in a chatty mood and I 
might be nice enough to write back to decline the 
offer. Catch me in a bad mood and you'll likely 
tick me off.

C) I'd rather deal with paying a little more and 
finding more awesome cels than paying a little 
bit less and having a hard time finding things I 
want. Yes, I want to get nice cels for as little 
as possible, but going back to my example - I'd 
rather pay a small fortune for the Clary pan cel 
as opposed to never seeing it at all.

So it's really up to you how to go. ^_^  One last 
thing I can mention is that if you do make a 
gallery, one way you can keep it semi-private is 
to not post and link the URL all over creation. 
As far as I know, there are only two links to my 
gallery, and I only post the URL here on the 
Forum once in a while. Not impossible to find, 
but it cuts down on traffic and annoyances. ^_^

Many Sharp Smiles,
--Drac