Speaking of image galleries (in Perl), I use "igal" as a static generator and it works great.

Available in the Debian archives as (igal), or otherwise here (stanford.edu)

I'd like to see people rolling their own to contribute to some of the existing tools, like igal, so that more than one person can benefit... after all, open source is about sharing.... there are probably other good DB-based solutions to look for as well.