Thumbnail gallery by date and taxonomy

It’s hard to know what aspect of this you are asking for help with, but as a developer I would create it like this:

• Create a page for each image gallery, perhaps using WordPress’s built in gallery feature
• Set a featured image on each gallery page
• Create a set of relationship fields in Advanced Custom Fields, perhaps with the paid Repeater add on, to let you choose what pages you want to feature

Then the code you write for the home page template would:

1. Grab the IDs of the pages you want to feature from the custom field…
2. Get the titles, thumbnails, and permalinks of those pages…
3. And display them

Advanced Custom Fields is a great plugin, particularly for customizing home pages.

If you aren’t a developer you will probably want to go with a plugin like NexGen Gallery which will let you create galleries and use a widget or shortcode to highlight some on the sidebar.

Hope that helps!