Creating an Image Gallery with scale in mind

I’m about to create an image gallery and I was hoping I could get some guidance as to how to go about it!

The gallery will start small and will end up with probably 5,000+ photos within a year (who knows how many more past a year!). Requirements are:

• The photos will 100% be managed by managers, so no user uploading or intervention is needed. However, I would like people in the future to be able to save their favourite photos to their account and to rate them, but this is a "nice to have" feature at this stage. I think I could use the snippet AnythingRated for this though.
• We could have tens of thousands of photos in the future so should I store them in a different database to the website?
• They will have a lot of metadata with them which will need to be searchable using the AjaxSearch snippet.
• Use phpThumb (or the like) to resize thumbnails on the fly.

So is MaxiGallery the way to go? Or can anyone point me in the right direction as to how I could accomplish this? It seems quite straightforward, I am just mindful of the number of images there could be and don’t want to develop something that will unsuitable when we hit the 1000+ mark.

Cheers!

The only thing with MaxiGallery (front-end management) or EvoGallery (module) is that they are tied to resources. Easy 2 Gallery is a module that allows you to use arbitrary folders for storing your images. Both use mini-template chunks for gallery output.