I made https://github.com/ggreer/jekyll-gallery-generator because I couldn't find anything. It's rough around the edges but good enough for my usage. With some tweaks to the templates and CSS, it can look nice: http://geoff.greer.fm/photos/

Nothing exactly like what you're describing, but this might help you get started: https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/pull/585

I've been working on this for the same sort of thing (not jekyll based, it's a Python script):

https://github.com/hillman/phog

I've been using it for my own purposes for a while but it needs some polishing. It's a static gallery generator that supports images and videos. It has themes and S3 uploads, with a plugin framework for anything else you might want to add on.

I am doing the same thing but I settled on using Middleman.

Its very easy to use like Jekyll and has some awesome plugins for both S3 and CloudFront integration.

Another static gallery generator (which I am the author): https://github.com/saimn/sigal/ It shares some spirit with pelican. Python, jinja2, themes (currently galleria and colorbox). The goal is to make it easy to use javascript libs like galleria.

What's really funny is that Nettuts have a tutorial for jekyll that goes over this exact topic. You could always use this as a starting point:

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/building-static-site...

Seems pretty doable if you want to run a custom plugin - probably more challenging if you are on GH Pages.

How about some older software: http://jalbum.net/en/ ?

started one this weekend, it lets you put image directories in _galleries/ and provides you with resized images. needs work yet before it's generally useful but might be a helpful start:

https://gist.github.com/schpet/5523001