After my first born arrived I hastily posted pictures with Web Gallery Wizard making this page. It was a quick easy way to get the images up fast and in a reasonably efficient mannery -- and more importantly my wife has quickly mastered how to update the site with the software as well (a minor miracle for her because she has a rather short computer attention span...)

Ok, but, this ultimately isn't what I would like to achieve, because I always wanted to make my son a blog which would serve as a sort of scrap book of major (and minor) milestones in his life. So I put this together.

My question is, how can I combine them. I would prefer to use one of the esisting photo gallery plugins like this but they all require image::magick which I do not have access to with my 1and1 account. This would be ideal because then people could leave comments not only on the text entries of my blog, but also the individual images.

But, I don't have I::M installed so I was trying to think of a work around that would use Web Gallery Wizard (since my wife is so comfortable with it). My thought was I would make a custom template for that application that would generate a <snippet> of code that I could insert into my MT pages dynamically such that the little images that appear on the right side of the screen would appear in my blog. The images would launch a new window 800 by 600 that would have that gallery in it.

Here is the problem though; I used to be a web designer years ago, but now I make prosthetic limbs. It has been a while and I don't know what I am doing anymore. So I was wondering if you guys think I am on the right track, or reinventing a wheel that has been around since just after I quit designing.

I used Web Gallery Wizard PRO and it works well - so fast and easy - see gallery samples. I know version 2.0 is in the works and will have a "journal" view that allows a lot of text entries with images on the side. Clicking an image takes the you to the repsective album page showing a large version of the image. I know version 2.0 will support audio, video, maps, etc. but it will not be released for another couple of months or so . Galleries created with version 1.5 will be forward compatible, as all that information is stored in the project XML file. However, themes will not, since the whole HTML layout will be revamped. The good news is that the new version will also provide a theme editor built in the program.

Let me know if you are able to integrate Web Gallery Wizard with any Blog product; that would be a cool mash-up!

Dan has a BetterFile Uploader plugin that makes for literally two click photo adding.
I'm 99.99% positive MT uses GD as well which almost all hosts have, if not move your site.

I did a custom gallery today with it, not completed but:
MT Gallery
If you click on a photo the thumbs are at the bottom.

As it comes his templates and file uploader does the default templates,
Using default MT templates

ABetterFileUploader has the default templates and plugin.