Organization help / ajax type menu

I've been playing with g3 since the beta's but still can't convince myself to make the move due to some functionality loss. One thing I had a problem with in g2 though, that I still have a problem with in g3, is the organization of my photos and how that affects navigation and the URL's. I have thousands of photos. Here's an example of how deep I have to nest some photos in albums. I may have a 100 photos of a bird called a warbler so they would be in the warbler gallery, under the bird gallery, under the wildlife gallery. Even if I set the internet address names for each album to something like a single character, I could still have something like this for a url http://gallerysite.org/g2/index.php/w/b/w/bird.jpg.html . Also, if a user is primarily interested in that gallery, it takes a good number of clicks. In this case, I even might have 100 or more pictures of a specific warbler and want to create even another level of albums for the specific bird. I never got to that level in G2, even though I was starting to find it necessary, because it just would have been too cumbersome for navigation.

So I think one option to solve this is to have all my images in the root, but then obviously organization and browsing would be a disaster with 1000's of images in the root. What would be nice is to have an AJAX type interface so that with all images in a root folder, a user could simply mouse over a tag, and see the thumbs with just that tag. A search works to some extent but it's not as efficient and the user has to know what they are searching for. With a menu type system you are directing the user to your categories or tags. From what I've seen with the current tag modules, they don't solve the problem either. I'd want the user to see the tags in the way I organize them, or as I want to present them (maybe in a hierarchy or by what I consider important for example), not simply by popularity.

Anyway, I think that gives a reasonable idea of my dilemma. Does anyone have other suggestions for organizing such a large number of photos, and/or possible modules that would help deal with the organization, browsing, and the long url's? The url is really the least of my concerns and if there was a better navigation/organization option, feasibly everything could be in one directory and the url issue would be solved.

Thanks,
Vern

http://vw.homelinux.net/g2