How to achieve slideshow and individual tagging simultaneously

Hi. I'm new to Photography group but I've been using Drupal for over a year now on multiple sites, and I love it. One thing I keep struggling with is how to create good photo albums. I've used CCK, Views and Thickbox, and that works well except it doesn't allow for automatic advancement through the slideshow. I've tried a couple others, but can't seem to get anything else to work well in either Drupal 5 or Drupal 6.

My dilemma right now is this: I need to create 6 albums of images. I need each one to allow you to advance through the larger images with a previous/next button, with manual or automatic advancement. This alone can be done with the scenario above. But I also need to be able to add keywords to each image. I can easily see how to set up one node with 30 images in it for the slideshow, but I don't see any method to uniquely tag each image with keywords. Alternatively, I can set up each image as it's own node and add a cck field that helps me sort it into the correct album view, but I don't see any way to force a slideshow through all those images if they are unique nodes. You can't do that, can you?

Any suggestions on how to set this up? I don't care whether it's Drupal 5 or 6, nor do I have any preference for modules. Maybe I'm just being a ditzy blonde and missing something obvious - I just need someone to point me in the right direction of how to get both the slideshow effect and the unique keywords at the same time.

Thanks,
cindyr