I presented a talk on building Drupal image galleries using the Dynamic Display Block (DDBlock) module at the Stanford Design4Drupal camp (http://d4dstanford.prod.acquia-sites.com/schedule). I'm attaching my how-to doc and presentation docs here as well as a zip of the database and entire code tree.

Here is a comparison of some Drupal slider/gallery modules: http://drupal.org/node/418616

Here is the DDBlock project page: http://drupal.org/project/ddblock

Here are additional resources for DDBlock:

http://ddblock.myalbums.biz/
http://themes.myalbums.biz/

The 3rd zip file contains the database and all the code (drupal core, supported modules, theme changes, etc.). So you can just install the database, put the code in your docroot, change the settings.php to point to your database, and everything should be there to play with. Instructions:

1) create a database
2) import demo database tables from file into your database
3) unzip demo code into /var/www/ (or wherever your docroot is)
4) copy default.settings.php to settings.php and point to database #1
5) go to browser: http://localhost/gallery
6) super admin is: "admin" / "gallery"

Good luck!