Jetpack Carousel, Justified Image Grid and nextGEN

I have been searching for the best way to display and manage my photography. I decided on lightbox I want to use: Jetpack Carousel. Next I also like the Justified image grid gallery look and also allows you to use the carousel lightbox. Here’s the problem: Most importantly, I have been in desperate need of a gallery/image manager where I can manage my images and set them up with tags so that I can create a gallery on a page/post that calls all images with that specific tag so that I do not have to upload the same image to different galleries it applies to. (like if I had a mountain picture that I wanted in galleries “mountains” and “popular” for example.

I downloaded nextGEN which allows me to setup galleries and tag images and populate galleries using specific tags, which is great, however now it seems it doesn’t work with Jetpack carousel b/c they are not wp images I guess. Is there a solution for this?

Or is there a better way to manage my photos altogether, allowing for image tagging and populating a justified image grid gallery along with the jetpack carousel.

I was so close to making it work. Thanks so much for the ideas.