Permalinks for categories & albums only

[Walkinman]

Hey folks,

The SEF plugin seems to have more than its share of issues, and I wonder if that's not because it's trying to do too much? Would a plugin or feature that allows for custom permalinks for albums and categories be possible, without concerning itself with the attached image display files? For example:

I have a page on my site (www.skolaiimages.com) for Polar Bear Photos:

mysite.com/stock/thumbnails-122-Polar-Bear-Photos.html

but if I want to add any keywords to the name of that gallery, such as "Polar Bear Photos | Alaska Polar Bear Photos", the url changes to

mysite.com/stock/thumbnails-122-Polar-Bear-Photos-Alaska-Polar-Bear-Photo.html

if I could manually set a url for the album, say stock/polar-bear-photos.html that would solve all the issues. And increase the SEO of the page. I could use the longer name for the album, keep the url short and both SEO and user friendly, and not run into problems with google and sitemaps trying to go to different urls that all offer the same content.

With the individual image displays, this could be optional. I don't think it's as important for those files (for me, anyway) and so the default dynamic string would be fine. And make the whole thing more manageable. If folks want to manually define a url for the image page, that could be an option, but it's not as practical for a site with thousands of pages.

I will read back over the SEF plugin thread and documents, but I don't believe it can function this way at all. Or even simply control the album urls and keep the image display urls as the default?

If someone can design this, it'd be awesome.

Thanks.

Cheers

Carl