Re: Photo Albums…. omfg!!
The issues with the existing plugins for ZenPhoto and NextGen are that they are designed for a single user blog and content.
When users are split into the different sections many of which do not have blogs it creates serious issues. I looked into those, and even stripped them down a bit.
I think WP 2.9 is on the path to galleries, although not active. It has editing, uploading, management(although wrong) and many other features that would be easier to get working then to hack around a outside solution.
Photos should be core, Events as well. If you want to develop these as “core plugins” that users have to activate like the repos in Linux thats fine, but they still need to be there and accessible.