Hi Uncle Cheese,
Is there any reason why you chose to have only a single page type in the Image Gallery? It seems to me that a more flexible solution would be to have a Gallery page type and an Album page type.
This way you could choose to have a free standing album if you wanted (which I do) and it may make the back-end data management more straightforward - i.e. you wouldn't have to have separate tabs for albums and photos, you just create a new album page under a gallery and have a tab in the album for uploading images.
The gallery could then pull in stuff from any child Album pages and Albums could check to see if they have a Gallery for a parent to provide access to sibling Albums.
This would be similar to how the Blog module works.
What do you reckon?
Pete

Ironically, I did it that way to avoid emulating the Blog module because I think it's flawed. I think the SiteTree model in Silverstripe is all together too bloated and awkward. The Blog module simply cannot serve someone who blogs every single day. Imagine after only a few months the dozens and dozens of entries in the site tree that one would have to sort through. It's tedious and cumbersome if you ask me. Not everything needs to be a page.

To me, an album doesn't need to contain all that data. It's a really simple concept. It's essentially just a bookmark in your gallery that organizes your photos. I didn't see the need to create all that bloat and give an album all the properties of a Page. Plus, I think the Gallery view as it is gives the user a nice clear view of all the content in one place, and allows one to upload photos to multiple albums without having to bounce around.

You're not the first person to bring that up, though. But then again, I'd had a lot of good feedback on the way it is now, too. Hard to please everyone!

I totally agree that the SiteTree concept can be over-worked and abused. This is one of my main problems with Drupal - it is really hard work to have it hold data that is not a Node, which always seemed heavy handed to me.

But I would definitely argue that things like Albums and Blog posts are actually SiteTrees. They are items of content, they have their own URI and they want to appear in some kind of navigation.

If your problem with Blog posts is that when there are loads of them in the treeview it is hard to manage, then this is a problem with the treeview representation not whether blog posts are SiteTrees or not. I remember in an Umbraco module there was a nice plugin that automatically grouped child items into subfolders based on either date or alphabet. This made it much easier to manage. Here it is: http://www.nibble.be/?page_id=4#datefolder.
Keep up the good work,
Pete