Creating a huge gallery

Greetings everyone!
I would like some tips and ideas on how to create a very large gallery(700+ images, 500mb+).

I have been using the standard WP gallery for some time now but I’m not quite satisfied. It seems to overload the webhost I’m using for some reason when uploading, and it doesn’t give me enough options when it comes to customizing each gallery. Do you know if there are any limitations to the wordpress gallery or is this a problem with my webhost?

So what I’m looking for is a better way to manage this. It’s not a requisite that it is a wordpress plugin or anything like that. I’ve been thinking about using PHP to create the gallery but due to my lack of knowledge in that area, I’ve stayed away.

I’d like the final gallery to be very simple, just thumbnails(which already have been generated) linked to the fullsized image, for use with lightbox. It would be ideal if I would be able to automatically generate more pages when the desired number of images on one page has been reached, but I would be fine with creating one gallery per page manually aswell.

Thank you very much in advance!