Use Media Library to manage galleries like Nextgen (with folders, albums, collections, tags, categories, terms…)

I’ve had this same problem for ages and have currently landed on the following combination of plugins to resolve the issue:

• Media Tags
• Tag Gallery
• Cleaner Gallery

Additionally, I made two modifications to the tag gallery plugin (to remove TimThumb and allow reverse ordering)

This solution still has a lot of downsides including that it uses three plugins, one of which I hacked, but it’s also the best solution I’ve come up with after months of thinking and searching.

(@fulvio, The “Media Tags” plugin does register a custom taxonomy onto the attachment post type, so you’re certainly right. It also improves the UI. If WordPress ever just supports the normal taxonomy UI on attachments, a lot of this problem would resolve itself quite quickly…)