Digital BW, The Print

>Has anyone run across a simple, cheap web-page creator for photo portfolios?

To cover all your needs you might have to abandon the "old" methods 
and use Cascading Style Sheets and use a lot of floating boxes. From 
no knowledge to a working site takes about a week. The only creator I 
know of is Layout Master:

http://www.westciv.com/layout_master/index.html


I have just finished a site for my wife at http://www.froposen.dk  . 
Its a word site in Danish but clicking around it will give you an 
idea of how powerful CSS could be for an image site. Doing a search 
for Java will also turn up a lot of Slide Shows and Multiple menus.

jerry.