Panorama Thumbnails

Hi. First thank you for a simple and elegant theme. I am glad you found the time to create it, and then you shared it, Great spirit man!
Quick questions:
1) I have a few panoramic images in a gallery. The gallery thumbnails are nicely displayed with a uniform row height. Thumbnails are created with respect to width (and height) then sized up according to height for the rows. This results in a pixilated thumbnail for wide images -worse as the image gets wider. Is there a clever solution to display a better resolution gallery thumbnail for wide pictures? Perhaps a way to use the medium sized image or a custom matted thumbs could be employed (though this would ruin the uniform height)? Any ideas? Example at http://lensvoodoo.x10.mx/ look at the “a big bend” gallery. Thank you.
2) In the help documentation for “galleries- image sizing” it says “Resize images to fit 2100x1400px on the longest edge, saved at JPG quality 6” with a picture underneath. I take it this is a picture from an image editing software not something in the wordpress/plugin functionality, basically recommended settings for sizing/resolution before upload?
3)Thank you for the autoplay code.It works nicely. If i paste the code into a page, then when the user selects thumbnail view the timer continues to funcion and the thumbnail gallery is interrupted and the slideshow continues. Is there a way to stop the slideshow from interrupting the thumbnail gallery view? I believe this is when the user would want more time to look at the possibilities, do you agree? Thank you again.