Best option for photo/gallery handling?

You can keep your whole site together, i.e. texts and images, the main suggestion: just don’t mix up large image/galleries with your text stream, this will indeed slow down your site loading. While most bloggers want display their pictures at any cost, most visitors just want read a specific text, then this approach become annoying and frustrating to most visitors.

Create a gallery area for your site still displaying to visitors that you have a gallery area. There you can take some measures like generate thumbnails for your galleries, keep the images in CDN, load the big images files by AJAX etc.

That’s it! (I miss Japan :,)