Ok, I cheated a bit but…
It’s working awesomely now… The gallery I’m using is My PHP DropBox and it is exactly what I want. A simple gallery that will build a photo album based on my directory structure without having to upload files and create albums. The use of Dropbox makes it as easy as drag and dropping for me to organize photos!
Anyhow, the gallery had some theming ability and I cheated by just copying the wordpress raw theme output into the themes the gallery uses. Not very elegant cause I’ll have to update every time I add a new page or a new month rolls over and the archive links changes, but oh well, I’m not going to complain. Hopefully with this last change, I can move my entire blog platform over.
Also, since my original images were so big, I’ve streamlined the process by using ImageConverterPLUS to just batch up everything. Anyhow, its Halloween time… Will write more about this process later!