I was just using the flash as a quick example to illustrate the layout. We both know that intuitive navigation is everything. Aesthetics is secondary... Facebook is living proof of that.

A thumbnail strip gives the user a way to quickly view every photo in the album, and something like that is very important..... then if you could just update the big photo and comments via ajax. The thumbnails don't have t be displayed very large ... you could size them down for the strip via css, then popup see more the larger version on hover... that way you wouldn't need any js for the popup... you could do it in css alone.