Well, after auditioning a ton of photo album plugins for WordPress, I decided simple was best. I set up “Lazy Gallery” from http://www.lazyboy.dk. It doesn’t do too much, but it does what I want it to and isn’t crowded with all the extra links for ratings, comments, etc. Those things are great, but I’m going for “Grandma-friendly” :).
There are a few things I’m working on. First of all, the plugin generates the thumbnails in real time, storing only the source image. I’ve about finished a simple caching setup along with some changes to avoid having PHP open and parse the files. It has to open the source file to get the height and width to display under the image, which takes quite a while, and isn’t worth it for me.
Secondly, I need to figure out how to get the plugin a little more integrated. I wanted to put the photo gallery on a tab at the top of the page. Each tab represents a “page” in WordPress. I’m currently using the “Redirectify” plugin to redirect the photo page to the PHP file for the gallery. This works fine except the tab doesn’t show as active when you click it.