Use of Gallery by a community - such as recording artist fan pics

Hi there! First-time post by a long-time Gallery user. Had rev 1 installed on my site a long while back, and am now returning to Gallery, excited about rev 3.0! I've done some searching, but haven't managed to find these answers on my own.

Is Gallery suitable for use by a community as a common area to upload and share photos?

The main thing I'm looking for is the ability for members to self-register (I know this is possible) and post to various galleries without being manually given permission by site owner/moderator.

The next important thing I'd probably need is the ability to have all new photos hidden until approved by a moderator.

A less important capability is ability for visitors to search/filter for photos by date (or more likely a range of dates) the photo was taken.

The particular use case I've got is for a recording artist who would like fans to be able to upload concert pics to a special area on the official website.

And if there's a plugin/module available for this, or even another type of gallery application, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks much!!

Thanks a bunch, Dave; that's very helpful!

As you point out, rather than saying I'm a long time user, I guess it would be more accurate to say that I'm a (functionally almost) new user returning after having been a user for a number of years a long time ago... :o) Most of the sites I've been helping with in the past few years have been WP; the last time I used Gallery was just after the release of G2. But I'm really looking forward to using G3 soon and taking advantage of all the great new features.

And now I'm going to wander over to the G3 area of the forum to see if the modules you listed are available for that release.