Adding pop-up, thumbnail-navigable gallery to WP page?

I already posted this in the installation forum, but then realized it’s more of a “how-to” problem. Apologies for the double post.

What I’m trying to add to my WordPress site is fairly specific and I haven’t found a good solution yet, after hours of scouring the web. I’m building a site for a rowboat-building company so that customers can learn about the different boat models. I’m going to have a single page for every model, but on each page I want to have a photo gallery showing the fine details of each boat. I have an <a> link on each model page that I want to link to a gallery, but I’d like this gallery to pop up in front of the page (like Lightbox).

In addition to this, I’d like the gallery that pops up to have a series of thumbnails available that the user can click on to view other photos in the album. I know this is asking a lot, but I can’t be the only one who’s ever wanted something like this on their site. Any advice?