Modifying Archive & Gallery Descriptions

I’m fairly new to WordPress so apologies if these are dumb questions !

Firstly, I’m using my Blog to store individual posts as reference pages rather than journal entries thus in the Archive section I don’t want the default grouping by month, I’d like individual post headings – maybe listed in chronological order. The date and month of the post has no relevance for me – the post title does.

How do I modify things so that it displays all the post headings ?

Secondly, when I add a photo gallery to a post, all I see is the image title. How do I get the resulting gallery to display the “desciption” field so that I can add more information relevant to the image. I can key in “description” data after uploading but it doesn’t appear to display anywhere.

Any help appreciated !