More text with album as well as picture descriptions

[chanchao]

Basically I want to make a site with Coppermine that looks something like "Fotopages.com" does, so a balance between a gallery and a blog.  I've tried lots of blog software and most do text really well, but getting pictures in is often a mess.

I've tried using Coppermine, by just creating an album for every blog-topic and then write the text in the album description field. That doesn't work; the whole text gets put into the album list, so too much text with one tiniest of thumbnails.

Then I've tried cutting up the text and putting a little in the album description and other bits in the picture description, but this also looks weird, for starters it centers the thumbnail text so it doesn't read comfortably.

Is there anything I can do with creating my own layouts/styles/themes to solve this?   I'm NOT looking for a typical blog as in a 'diary' format with a calendar and all.   It's more topic based, with some text and some pictures for every topic (album).

My current site is here: http://chanchao.fotopages.com, this more or less shows what I want.  (I am flexible with the layout though, as long as a couple of paragraphs of text can show more or less in the vincinity of some thumbnails that link to the full sized picture then I'm already quite happy..

Can do with Coppermine or am I wasting my time?   I really like the ease of use of quickly uploading some pics and writing my text and be done with it..  Blog software still isn't as straightforward.

Cheers,
Chanchao