Use Case for Galleries

In Dave's Twin Cities Drupal Camp presentation he asked for sample uses. My biggest bugaboo is the concept of galleries. There are essentially two ways that I want to be able to create a gallery: event-based groups of images and collections of themed images uploaded at different times.

Event-Based Groups of Images

My friends have started a rock band. I take care of their promotional Web site. They wanted to have an (easy-to-manage) photo gallery for their events. (We'll ignore the more complicated fan photos for now.) In this case it makes sense for them to have a single point to upload many related photos. Currently I deal with this by creating a new content type that has unlimited images associated with it. I then use the view mode to create a gallery experience of the images attached to the node. It works great, but it's "complicated" to set up.

Groups of Themed Images

My friend owns a bed and breakfast. She wants to be able to upload pictures of the garden so that visitors can see what the place looks like in the season they're visiting. In this example she has a few photos at a time that are related to 'spring' or 'garden' that should be grouped after they are uploaded. In this example having a single node for the images is a pain..especially if the images fit into a few different categories. In this example a content type "images" that has one file associated with one node and have tags for sorting. It's not Flickr-ideal, but it works.

The difficulty of creating these types of galleries became apparent to me last year when I had to write out the procedural instructions for how to create them. I've attached copies of the workbooks I wrote up (CC BY-NC-ND) for reference. These workbooks are for sale on my site as theming/site building kits. The instructions should not be extracted.

These are pretty typical types of galleries. It would be great if there were an easy way to set up these galleries with a single click. I don't know if the right way to do it is to have a field widget, or an installable feature, or something else... thoughts?