Pages/Blogs and structure

Hi,

I have recently got in to using WordPress, within the last week or so – I have relatively good web design experience, however I am after some advice from some more well experienced WordPress users.

The site I have been working on has a gallery of images, each image has a custom field for a URL (which links to a page for that item), so that when an image is added to a gallery it can link to the page specified in the custom field. All good so far – everything works) Is there a way so that when a new image is added it is added to a gallery on a page (i.e. if i uploaded an image and tagged in with the word ‘car’, it would add its self to the gallery on the ‘car’ page for instance?

Secondly, page templates. I have installed the Easy Content Templates addon which allows me to create templates e.g. add columns a default set of text, gallery etc. However, if I update the template it does not apply the changes to pages (by design presumably) is there a way to achieve this? i.e. like the way Dreamweaver DWT (templates) work – essentially, change the template which then applies to specific pages.

Merging the 2 above questions, what would be great is if when I upload a photo and tag the photo it gets added to the gallery page and added to the gallery that sits on the page specific to the item.

Am I doing this correctly by using pages? I do not wish for anyone else to amend it, so no posts, comments etc are needed either.

Finally, If i wanted to add a custom menu (a pencil crayon style nav for a primary school), e.g. an image with a link to each page. how would I achieve this?

Thank you in advance, I really appreciate it.

Matt