Pop-Up Photo Galleries?

I’m putting together a newspaper style website using WordPress as the engine of the site (and a WP-Zoom theme). In the sidebar, I have a conditional sidebar module which lists multimedia components to the page based using custom fields. It’s easy to link to stuff that’s off-site or not uploaded to WordPress, but photo galleries are giving me a problem.

What I’m looking for is a plugin or anything that will let me open a gallery in either a pop-up window or a lightbox/thickbox/etc equivalent WITHOUT inserting a bunch of thumbnails at the bottom of the post. Ideally, I could put a text link in a sidebar and activate it like that. The idea is to make this as idiot proof as possible because I have to keep in mind that the people using this system won’t all be terribly computer savvy.

In the past, I’ve used the CSS visibility property to hide the thumbnails, but that’s a pain in the ass and a bad solution. It also doesn’t solve my problem of wanting the link to be in the sidebar.

Any advice?

Edit: It might be helpful to put a link to my site. http://newcenturyjournalism.com