[superkuh]

Ah, in that case after the wife has looked at photos, named their file names accordingly and put them in the dir she can run http://xome.net/projects/jigl/ or any other .html photo gallery generator. It'll show thumbnails, exif info, and she can press ctrl-f to search in the browser.

I guess you want the gallery generation to be automagic though. Might be some work but you could whip up a cron shell script to see if any sub-dir in ~/www/photos/ has files and doesn't have an index.html and have it autogenerate them.

As I write this I do realize it's starting to get pretty complex. Almost like you'd wish for an all-in-one solution like you'd asked. But I still think this method would be better long term though.