What if the large images were (optionally?) not displayed in the HTML gallery?
The main gallery page could show thumbs and corresponding metadata (left to right, 1 row per image) and deep link directly into the corresponding flash image URLs.
Less of a standalone site and more of a metadata backend to feed the flash, helping to protect the original web images by simply not showing them openly in HTML.
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I'll comp an example of what I have in mind later tonight and post it here -;)