And to get back on topic..
Ed, to add to my original list of freebie software you might consider movabletype yourself.
The benefits are you can have a site up and running very quick. It has a content management system for text. It has a plethora of free plugins and templates some of which can create a gallery/photoblog section in your site.
You can go with a free template to start and when you've got upto speed on how it all works you can create your own templates. One of MT's strong points is that having created a new template you can regenerate the site from your exsiting content so you don't have to reinput anything. Also it generates static html if you want it to which helps greatly with performance.
Its highly configurable.
And its all free until you want to start using it for commercial purposes at which point you can buy the relevant license.
server requirements are Perl and MySql and its best to have PHP as well for some functionality. Imagemagick also but I think it works with GD libraries if ImageMagick is not available.
Most Unix based webserververs have all of the above installed.
check it out
www.sixapart.com/movabletype/pricing
www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/photos/index.html
Another one is
wordpress.org which is real simple to install, totally free but its pages are produced dynamically. Lots of free "Themes" for ths one too including photoblog themes. Requires PHP and MySQL
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