What version for plain HTML photo displays, efficient operation and plenty of room for long captions?

I recently stopped using KodakGallery after many years. The new Adobe Flash implementation killed the experience for users on older machines and with no broadband. (They generally give up before the mass of Flashdom can download.) The pop-up bubble captions that require cursor-over are also a show stopper for my verbose travel logs. (What captions, they ask me?)

Shopping for a similar replacement online gallery, none of them come close to the kind of travel journal I want to present. I was thinking I have web space so why not look around for something to use on it. I landed at [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_gallery_comparison [/url]. I looked at a lot of demos but the project links for Gallery didn't produce easy to find demos like the other packages did, but after several google searches I found some claiming to be Gallery. I liked the looks of them if they are indeed based on Gallery. Anyone know of a good demo site?

The second concern that came up was when I started to download Gallery to install and test on my web server, I caught a drift that there's some new kind of "flash like" feature that displays the photos. My immediate concern if this will kill performance on dial-up and reduce my captions to short sentences like KodakGallery did?

Can a home just get a HTML photo gallery with some nice space for captions? Is there some back level of Gallery that provides base HTML presentation that still has the latest bug fixes and a prominent area for a paragraph or so about the photo? Also, I need a version that does not require a SSH console for my low budget 1and1 account. Suggestions welcomed.