image support like on blog sites?

i recently signed up for Vox. the way it works with and handles images is great.

you go to one page to easily upload some images. they are displayed then in a gallery.

when you are making a post, you can easily embed some of the images directly from the gallery.

i see there are many, many Image and image gallery plugins for WordPress – but which ones are the best? which work like on other sites?

i saw one plugin that shows a gallery and lets you insert pictures from your Flickr account, but i have so many pictures already saved on the server my page is at.

right now, i’ve been uploading the pictures with CuteFTP, and then manually adding the <img> tags to posts in WordPress to embed the images. i’d like things to work as nicely as it does in Vox.