Looking for better way to work with Lightbox gallery plugin

I am using the Lightbox gallery plugin and I am very happy with the way the galleries look.

However it is pretty hard to manage galleries using the normal [gallery] tag and I am really not pleased with the automatic thumbnail generation. So I am casting around looking for a better solution. What I want is the gallery management and thumbnail generation of NextGen Gallery that works with light box.

What I want is:

• Lightbox gallery viewing (showing image metadata, click on right of images goes next, left of image goes previous)
• Ability to load and manage images
• Thumbnails that show the whole image with out distortion

Has anyone come across a combination that will work for what I am looking for? How hard would it be to tweak the NextGen plug-in to not display its own image navigation and just let Lightbox do it?

Thanks,

Ian