That’s a good tip irishblue — I am trying to avoid having WordPress make thumbnails at all. Since I like resizing using phpThumb. But no CMS I know of “deletes the original huge image.”
In spite of that limitation, I also highly recommend phpThumb. I’m having a bit of difficulty with it at the moment (because I did something funny to the folder permissions), but it comes highly recommended. Using it, you can also stick with WordPress to drive your gallery rather than go to Gallery 2 or Coppermine.
If you integrate phpThumb into your templates, there is an important advantage to using phpThumb over WordPress’ created thumbnails: if the design ever changes, you don’t have to go back and re-upload images and create new thumbnails. Just change the sizing parameters in phpThumb (the ‘h’ and the ‘w’ in the string). There’s also other cool options like being able to auto-manipulate the images created.