Advice about setting up a website with photo galleries

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I'm helping a friend set up a website which will be a resource with information and photos about a particular type of vehicle. There are a number of different manufacturers of this type of vehicle.

He is in a unique position to provide information and regular photos of these vehicles in interesting locations.

This is quite a niche area and a hobby for him, there is also some potential to make money through using ads to monetise informational articles and growing a Youtube account alongside it.

There is a lot of interest in similar types of vehicles to this one and interest is likely to grow in the future, with similar websites in related niches often forming communities with regular return visitors.

How to layout the website photo galleries

I've always created content based websites and haven't ever created a photo gallery so I'm a little unsure about how best to go about this.

For the photo gallery section of the website I'm planning to create a category called photo gallery and then I will create a page or post for each vehicle manufacturer showing some photos of different vehicles the manufacturer produces. There will then be further pages (one for each specific model of the vehicle) which will each display photos of that particular model.

New photos will be regularly added to each of these photo galleries so there may end up being 50+ photos in some of them.

How would you go about setting up a photo gallery page or post in Wordpress in a way that makes it easy to add new photos into the gallery. I'll be making the photos as small in file size as possible without losing quality but I envisage the page or posts being very slow even with the images compressed.

Would you create these galleries as pages or posts and do you have any suggestions for how best to help google find these photo resource pages. I'll be optimising the image name / alt text and plan to title the pages or posts like /vehicle-name-photos/ as there are people searching for some of these terms and aren't many photos available.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. thanks.