Image Galleries Views Confusion

Originally we had all of our photos galleries at www.example.com/image using the gallery_view and it worked just fine. We recently redesigned the galleries landing page and used the gallery_view_terms view instead as we were told that is the one we were supposed to use all along (correct?). The path for this was set to /photos. So, we tried to delete the Page display for the old gallery_view but this caused the views in the redesigned /photos section to only show the same gallery listing over and over again when clicked on and never the node thumbnails inside each gallery. So, we added it back. Does the gallery_view control individual gallery presentation and the gallery_view_terms show all of the image galleries? If so, does the gallery_view always have to have a Page display associated with it to work properly? And if that is the case, why does it need a path when the taxonomy terms dictate the path for each gallery?

At this point, I wanted to just create a redirect from /image to /photos to quickly "resolve" the problem but the path redirect module states that the /image page is already in use (even though there are no galleries, just a blank page). And when I create a 301 redirect in htaccess it somehow it ends up in a loop with www.example.com/image going to www.example.com/photos?q=image. The format we used is: Redirect 301 /image http://www.example.com/photos.

Sorry for the rambling... Just frustrated and trying to figure this all out... Any help or clarification greatly appreciated...