NextGen Gallery and Navigation / Browsable – How?

Yet another thread .. sorry, everything I find seems to be 2-3 years old and the solutions break more stuff than fix:

I’d like to put galleries up much how Gallery 2/3 work where I just have the opening and if I add something new, it shows up there in it’s own titled section.

The way NGG works, you have to add a blog post for each one.

So I’ve figured out to do a page with:
[album id=1 template=extend]
[album id=2 template=extend]
[album id=3 template=extend]
… etc.

With a couple hundred entries, this could get unwieldy fast.

Which brings me to the second part- there’s no breadcrumb/navigation system at all. So if you pick album 29, you have to use the home page to get back to the top again and start over.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to put stuff in groups by year, browse 1999, and see everything under it, drill down, drill back up. I’ve tried Yoast breadcrumbs and it does nothing for me.