Simple question , simple answer : how to set the parameters

Simle question ...
How to choose the ARTICLE LAYOUT parameters to get a horizontal row of 8 thumbnails ?

As far I can see there are two main designs suitable :
a) Portal Mode 4 and b) slideshow

the standard parameters are 10 10 10 10 3 1 1

I assume I would need 8 pages ?
Or ? 5 columns or ?

It would be useful to know what is meant exacly by :
pages , columns and links in pages ?

Can there be several thumbnails in one page ?

It is very difficult to figure the correct settings out considering the erratic results I am getting.
Greetings from Europe

seeing that nobody answers , I give part of the answer as I figured it out myself :

a PAGE is apparently the same as screen ,
a COLUMN is a small frame containing the article and or the article image ,
5 columns means 5 slides /images or frames horizontally aligned across the screen ,

ROW means , if set to more than one that there will be several articles in each frame ,

Now why are the images not all appearing ?