Well, ultimately I settled for the NextGEN Gallery Search plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery-search/
Seconded,
Using WP 3.3.1 / Faster image insert 2.2.0 / NGG 1.9.3
Bumping this, because we’ve ran into the same issue, over 3000 galleries and no easy was to reach a specific one.
