Whats best for mainly pic site?

Expression Engine by Pmachine.com may fit the bill quite well.

I use it to power both of my websites, one is mostly photo's and a little text (http://photography-of-rock.com) while the other is more text and some photos (http://davidjaymz.com) although i've gone off the layout of DJ.com its far too busy.

The basics of what you need to do are fine... Each section will be a gallery, and each sub-section would be a category, you can have "weblogs" for the text or use includes to put them in... EE is extremely customisable and can do pretty much everything you want...

Admin wise its admin section is very straightforward. adding pictures is a breeze, it'll even resize them and make thumbnails for you on the fly.

Check it out.

Very nice, thanks for those I'll check them out

bravenet has a paid version of their photo albums, which have all the options you listed above... check it out...

Coppermine Photo Gallery

Thanks guys, although bravenet isn't an option (have never liked them since they wouldn't give me a guestbook way back when lol).

They have cleaned up their act, or so??? lol...(bravenet)
So hows the project coming up?

Another good one that might work is Gallery

I liked Gallery when I used it. The only problem is that you can't fully customize the tempaltes without a lot of hacking - you can only change colours and put your logo at the top.

Does anyone know of a good gallery script that allows for full customization? I want it to fit right into my site template.

That depends on exactly what you mean, Megan. There's actually a header and footer file, though I don't remember exactly where it is. You can see my customization here:

http://www.tandswebdesign.com/gallery/

Of course, that's set up for clients to upload pictures with descriptions, so you can't actually see the albums or anything. But it gives you an idea of the customization. You can probably see what Megan is talking about, with the silver/grey bars and such. That's the part that's not heavily customizable without much hacking. But you can use whatever template you want for the header and footer.

Unfortunately, that's not well documented. I believe it's in the HTML folder of Gallery.

Oh, okay, so you were able to do it. I looked into it quickly about a month ago and couldn't find any documentation or anything so I figured I'd have to go into the source code.

Gallery is great and very powerful. I recently stumbled onto a really cool gallery that works with WordPress. It is a plugin which allows your flickr account photos to be insterted into your blog 'gallery' page. Very sweet.

Incase anyone is interested here is the link: http://www.worrad.com/archives/2004/11/20/flickr-gallery-wp-plugin/

Only down side with that is there is not the requirements listed above, but a way cool plugin worth sharing !

Oooh! Tha'ts interesting! I'm using wordpress so that would be a good one to try. Thanks for posting that, James!

Gallery is phenominal and can be easily customized to totally match your site.

After much hacking, I finally have it (almost) working the way I want:

http://www.meganjack.com/photos/gallery/

Check out the source. Bu-bye tables (well, most of them anyway). I had to take them out to figure out what the CSS was doing - hacked that up too. There's still a few things I need to fix, and obviously get more photos in there but I'm actually almost happy with it! The new version is supposed to be much easier to customize.

Is anyone else using Gallery Remote? I love that thing! So much easier to get photos uploaded, corrected, and captioned.

Edit: Oops! Big mess in Firefox. More work to do on zee CSS
Edit 2: that's fixed, but can anyone tell me why the navbar works fine in IE on the main site but not on the gallery? Same code...

flickr beta is cool too, its like blogging using only pics, in gallery and the like, you could customize too if you like, it was awarded in the webby awards...