This might be a bit out of reach for me as a non-web-coder, but I am wondering if there is way of having thumbnails from a collection item occupy a variable number of “blocks” on a page.
I love this website as a reference: https://elastic.tv/
On this page, as you scroll down, project thumbnails can occupy one block, two blocks side by side, or four blocks for a very large thumbnail.
The effect is that the thumbnail page takes on a lively appearance that is not simply a regular grid.
I would imagine that the collection item would have a switch to define the “block” configuration. From there, though, I am not sure how one might set up conditions to define the thumbnail size.