WordPress gallery todo

I’m still trying to figure out how I want to organize the gallery on my blog here for the huge flood of pictures I’m taking.
Do I post them on the date they’re taken? ‘Cause that would mean I’d have to add a lot of posts with dates long gone by.
Do I use a seperate custom field for the date or tags? Because I do want to keep some sort of chronological track and context. Do I upload all the pics or do I split the family pictures out to my friends only blog. That would also mean splitting posts between 2 sites. Do I upload as is to keep all the EXIF info in tact or do I run them through a batch to make the filesize a bit easier to swallow? We’re talking thousands of pictures here…
How do I make a new page that lists only the gallery posts, with 1 thumbnail per post for easy navigation and the total amount of pics per album, like Matt?
Meanwhile the picture up there is from Kasteel Hoensbroek we visited today, there’s a lot more photos but eh, yeah… as soon as I figure out the answers to the questions above.

Hoensbroek was terribly lovely on the outside. Majestic is the fitting word but I was disappointed with their idea of keeping up the 17tth century design. It was drab and dreary and it looked like it hadn’t been touched up since the 70′s. It smelt of new old instead of ancient old. I wasn’t too chuffed about that.
Ah well, that stairway leading up to the tower was claustrophobic! It kept going and going. Thank god for small breaks in between.