WordPress Image Gallery Woes

Why is it so hard to have a photo album integrated into WP?!
I have thousands of pictures on my harddisk taken over the last 10 years or so that I want to upload, Flickr doesn’t give the control that I want. This week, I took out my rusty Canon G6 (well, not rusty but it might as well be) after one year to teach my son how to take pictures, and thought I might as well set up a photo album here.
So I’ve spent the last 2 hours searching for WP plugins (not standalone albums) and thought I found a good one – Word Press Photo Album , uploaded it, configured it as required… but it just won’t work!
Its not letting me create a default album, and shows no errors. After some debugging (PHP is not my language), it seems that the form variables are not getting through, and the relevant function wppa_add_album is not called… so I entered the record manually in the database just to get started… the album showed up but now adding images shows the same behavior 🙁
Maybe its the WordPress version, maybe its my host, maybe its something else… but I’m giving up now. I guess I’ll wait for a future WP version that has a built-in album.
Here’s my son, trying to give a ‘big smile’

harris-big-smile-20070715

If you know of an easy to install integrated album for WP, please let me know.