I've finished fiddling with my installation of plogger (for now) i've done a few mods to it to get it how i want.
Basically I used the integrating plogger skinning technique from here http://www.davidcubed.com/integrating-plogger/ to make it look like my wordpress theme, although wihout the sidebar.
I also used to wordpress plugin so that on the homepage 5 random images appear
I used the lightbox JS from the plugin on the rest of the gallery as well, now when you click on a thumbnail you get the image in a lightbox with the caption and the prev and next links working throughout the gallery, this also works when you search so it will allow you to prev/next through your search results as well.
As i still wanted comments I simply made the comments text underneath a thumbnail into a link to the picture page and took off the the link to the individual picture.
you can see it all at work here http://www.roryosullivan.co.uk/photos/