Views is a fantastically powerful module! For those of you who haven't played with it in the past, you definitely should. Now I'm a big proponent of doing things the same way as much as possible (technically speaking). If you don't have to hunt and peck all over creation for what you're looking for, I deem it a good thing. With that said, the image_gallery.module leaves some to be desired. It does some great work for us, true, but the way it goes about it is entirely different from they way that one might like it to be done. What follows is a method that will allow you to control your image galleries via views, and still retain the nice feature set of image gallery.