According to: https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html, google prefers to index view-all portions of paginated content but the problem here is that my site is an image site and loading more images consumes significantly more bandwidth.
I'm trying to figure out how to make google index the smaller groups instead of the "view all" page.
In my attached image is a sample of a photo gallery relationship configuration for my website. Let each box represent 100 pictures and assume the gallery we are dealing with has 399 pictures. People can choose to view either 100 pictures per page (aka pink boxes), 200 per page (aka green boxes) or 400 per page (aka blue boxes). The 400 per page is effectively the "view all" page. I currently have rel=canonical on the pages showing 100 pictures per page and 200 pictures per page pointing to the single 400 pictures per page to explicitly declare to google that all these pages are the same content broken up differently.
At this point, I feel that I cleared all potential duplicate content issues but at the same time, I'd rather have only 100 pictures per page indexed instead of the full 400 per page because I want people from around the world to view 100 at a time without waiting for the remaining 300 thumbnails to download. Yes I have them all in sprite sheets but it still takes longer to download more data.
What can I do to make google understand that I only want the 100 pictures per page indexed? and I don't mind if it is just the first page (of the 100 pictures per page) and nothing else in this whole set. I just want users to see that things load extra quick, and they like picture previews.
Any ideas?
P.S. Feel free to modify this if I'm not making sense because google is not making sense to me.