On the Codrops blog there's a recent tutorial posted showing how to create a fully-functional image slider/viewer with a combination of HTML, jQuery and a bit of PHP (here's a demo).

In this tutorial we are going to create another full page image gallery with a nice thumbnail area that scrolls automatically when moving the mouse. The idea is to allow the user to slightly zoom into the picture by clicking on it. The thumbnails bar slides down and the image resizes according to the screen size.

Based on this tutorial, they show you how to build on it and add a few new features like a changing cursor depending on its position in the current image. The show the folder structure you'll need, the HTML and PHP to make the backend work and the CSS and Javascript to round out the frontend. If you want to skip straight to the good stuff you can also just download all the code and get started.