I am still caught in the same struggle — mine is a bit harder because I am not a php god — but I am still looking for a good free album / picture organizer / viewer. I like the frame and viewer idea — however the static coding gets old — trust me :) I’ve been doing it now for almost 2 years. I’ll admit that I’ve been pretty lazy with it and haven’t spent the time to create my own album page — but I have found a great plugin for WordPress that lets you imbed a gallery into a post using AJAX and lightbox and it is pretty straightforward to manage and implement. It is called NextGen Gallery. It might be something to look at for posting inline blog photos rather than deferring to a gallery page.

If your box is hosted on Linux look at gscripts for some handy photo-resizing and renaming scripts to batch process your photo galleries — makes it easy to size down thumbnails and photos for optimized load time. A good mass renaming script I’ve found is called mvb — if you can’t find it (I think it is no longer supported) let me know cuz I’ve got a copy on my server.

I had to laugh when I saw your wife’s preggar pictures because my wife is super self-conscious about her belly button too :). It is a pretty awesome feeling to feel the little thing moving around inside the belly!!

Woot!