Image gallery from two tables

Question

I've created an library that stores image names by ID and an image gallery table that stores the values of up to 15 images by image ID. The data looks like this:
ImageTable (id | name)
1 | one.jpg
2 | two.jpg
3 | three.jpg
4 | four.jpg
5 | five.jpg
6 | six.jpg
Gallery Table (id | slide1 | slide2 imageID ... and so on to slide15)
1 | 1 | 3 | 4 | null | null .... and so on to 15
1 | 2 | 5 | 6 | null | null .... and so on to 15
In this example the slide show 1(id1) would show one.jpg, three.jpg, and four.jpg
Slide show 2 would show two.jpg, five.jpg, and six.jpg.
If I pass a recordID (gallery.php?recordID=1) to the page I'm getting a perfect gallery recordset. Just one column comes in. I can't seem to figure out how to match that table row to the image table.
I think the problem is in the Query. I've tried dozens of loop and join queries but I can't seem to get anything to work I want to build a list of image names like this (html omitted):
if ($row_imgGalery['slide1'] == $row_imageTable['id']){
   echo $row_imageTable['name']; }
if ($row_imgGalery['slide2'] == $row_imageTable['id']){
   echo $row_imageTable['name']; }
if ($row_imgGalery['slide3'] == $row_imageTable['id']){
   echo $row_imageTable['name']; }
// and so on
The closest I have come is to get the first row to return the right value. From there on I get either nothing or the images in order. I'm probably going about this all wrong. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I can see that I didn't explain myself very well. My Gallery table must have a unique ID for every gallery. 1 cant assign gallery 1 image 1 and then  image 3 later one because the Gallery table populates the gallery page. I need a slot for each image just the same as a contact table needs a slot for first name, last name, address, etc.... The image slots are no different that that except that they all refer to image id's. If there's a way for a single record to call up 15 variables without having 15 columns I'd be interested in seeing it.
My image table will shortly contain about 2000 images. In a year it could contain 10,000. Each row in the image table contains the image ID, and a bunch of other data including descriptions, user ID for the person submitting the image and other things including metadata for the images. I've got the image upload and image data part of the system working perfectly. It's searchable by image type, user, date, photographer. It's beautiful. I can find any image in the library in seconds.
I've created a form to populate the Gallery table that uses a scrollable, searchable image gallery. You can select up to 15 images for each gallery. All that is stored is the gallery id (primary key) date (date the gallery was created) user id (id of the person creating the gallery) Gallery Name (self explanatory) Gallery Description (a descriptive paragraph for the gallery) and slots for up to 15 images. At the end of the table is an approval field. Set approval to no and the gallery pages no longer appear in the public menu structure but administrators can view and edit the page. I've used this technique for hundreds of different data sets from contact managers to blogs.
A simple Dreamweaver Master Detail page sets calls up the Gallery page by galleryID when a user clicks on a link. Originally I entered image names in the 15 available slots for images just to get things started. When using image names the gallery page works perfectly but there's no way to link to the other data.
The gallery page displays all images in a 3 column by 5 row layout. A slide show of the images can be played full screen. Having less than 15 images in a gallery is not a problem because if the column contains a null nothing is displayed on the page.
I can't be inserting Gallery ID's into the image records because one image may be used in multiple galleries. I don't want to insert all of the data from the Image table into the Gallery page because that's a bunch of redundant data. All that needs to happen is that the gallery slide 1 column needs to link to the same image id in the image table so I can retrieve and display the rest of the data. The only way that I can seem to make this work is to write up fifteen separate queries. There's got to be a simpler way to have gallery slide1 point to an image id and call up the fields and so on.
Because of a deadline I wrote 15 separate queries and the system works just fine. There's way more code than is necessary, but it works just fine. Every possible available  image slot needed it's own query. If someone has an idea of how to simplify this please let me know. I'm going to go and soak my hands now. I've been typing code for 3 hours straight.
Here's my code that's working: (the html and other fields are omitted for clarity)
<li>
<?php
$slide1 = $row_pageRS['img1ID'];
$img1 = mysql_query("select * FROM imageLog WHERE id = $slide1");
if (mysql_num_rows($img1) > 0)
{ while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($img1))
    echo $row['imageName']; }
?>
</li>
<li>
<?php
$slide2 = $row_pageRS['img2ID'];
$img2 = mysql_query("select * FROM imageLog WHERE id = $slide2");
if (mysql_num_rows($img2) > 0)
{ while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($img1))
    echo $row['imageName']; }
?>
</li>
And so on until I get to slide 15.