Adding images to taxonomy terms to create fancy custom taxonomy menu

There is implied doubt that Drupal can be configured to run a photo gallery. I am working on such a site, and I can assert that YES, Drupal is flexible and powerful enough to create a photo gallery using just a few modules.
Here is a nature and general photography web gallery that is intuitive to browse - http://idonny.com

iDonny Productions: Web CMS and UI/UX Design, Development & Web Standards

Drupal alone without Gallery2 + the G2 module can create some nice looking photo galleries like the one you have, but it seems like you end up with two options - a site like the one that you have created with lightbox or slim box or whatever, or a site where every image is its own node. Not knocking either of those options, but they don't fit my needs.

With every image its own node, you end up with most of what you get with Gallery, but if you have thousands of images, they're all in one big directory, you can't easily have a hierarchical URL for the image itself (for the image node, yes, but not the image) and other inconveniences.

If you go for your solution, you get some nice display options which work very well for a site like the one you have, but you lose the ability to have long descriptions of images, which sometimes you may want, comments on individual images and so forth. Furthermore, it doesn't really degrade nicely for a user without JS (i.e. you always have to use the back button). Ideally, I would want it to degrade gracefully to show the image on a drupal page, rather than just the plain image itself, removed from any html whatsoever.

I've looked over so many solutions that depend on only Drupal and modules and always come to the conclusion that if I want to leave behind Gallery entirely, I would need to create an image module that handles its own uploads and, well, just behaves a lot more like Gallery.

Gallery is huge and cumbersome and doesn't integrate with Drupal search and taxonomy, but it's still the only way to really get everything I want for the time being and the G2 module is making some really great strides lately, so it's becoming an even better solution.

Depends on what you need of course and most certainly not everyone needs Gallery. Gallery is sort of the "nuclear bomb" solution - overkill for many applications (in fact, nuclear warfare is where the term overkill comes from now that I think of it, so I guess that's a good metaphor).

Is there a better way to do an image gallery?
Do you know of any working examples, and whether someone would like to do writeup of the experience, including modules needed.

I would like to find out an example for the March newsletter if possible.

Thank you.

Have you looked at AcidFree? That's the closest you'll get to Gallery type functionality and is pretty damn nice.

I'm looking for an image gallery without the overhead really, and also one that can be reviewed for the newsletter. Let me have a look at this.

I'd like to hear more on this thread, anything at all. Anyone came ups with a Drupal 6 ideal solution yet?