While it's not to cheap, I have to agree, photopost is great.
I use it as well, there is a vb to photopost integration that has the gallery show up in a forum like display on your vb forumhome page.
Shows, last picture, last comment, and handles permissions very well. For example, if you make a specific gallery category only viewable by x usergroup, in the forumhome hack, that gallery category will only show up for x usergroup.