One interesting note, which makes a lot of sense.

Dr. Math points out that the most items you can fit in is the area of the page divided by the area of the smallest item.

That means that you could never get more than 5 photos on a page no matter what you try (8.5x11/3.5x5 = 93.5/17.5 = 5), so that simplifies your search quite a bit...

Even with that case, it looks like you have to "waste" one photo worth of blank space, and you can only fit 4...
--
Mike