in Grow- how do i hide thumbnails with an overlay instead of enlarging the image within the grid? So that there is only the enlarged image visible.

Lots of customization - that format simply doesn't do that out of the box.

we've been working for the good part of 4 hours trying to figure it out. any ideas? any directions on where to start?

i have been using thickbox but i want my gallery thumbnails size to be based off its longest size regardless of whether it is horizontal or vertical. Grow seems to solve that problem but i'd like the chosen image to overlay.

I don't know how to teach somebody javascript via a forum in one post - or even 10 posts. Four hours is alot of wasted time trying to cut and paste and push buttons for this.

You need to customize - you need to have some understanding of the underlying code to do that.