So, a few years ago I wrote some perl code to handle the display of my 
photo albums and the way it generally works is that you can set the 
numbers of rows x columns for the thumbnail page.

Since I'm currently reading Jeff Zeldman's excellent work I'm motivated 
to try and change my old td's to an css stylesheet solution. I'm still 
reading his book and I'm currently on page 240 reading about the "The 
Image Rule" so it sounds like in order to do n x m matrix of images 
you'd have two img classes setup whereby one is block and the other is 
inline.

Are there any examples of this kind of thing anywhere?

You can see my existing approach here.

http://www.elastica.com/cgi-bin/showAlbum.cgi?albumName=weddingbell