implementing page hierarchy with multiple images and minimal contributed modules

Hi,

to build some kind of a portfolio site (a site showing works from different fields), I started using the book page content type in Drupal. I created two books "education" and "research" (a third one called "professional" will be added later), and than I used book pages to add content, which means pages showing projects. The book navigation is great for that, e.g. when I am on a page giving information about a project from my studies, I can get easily to the previous or next project, or go "up" to an overview of my education projects.

Now as I am talking about projects in architecture, I would like to show images related to the projects, such as photographs, drawings, renderings. To get the process of importing pictures into my site a bit more effective, and to allow global changes such as rescaling later, I installed the image module (in general I am trying to avoid contributed modules, as I cannot spend to much time in site maintainance and do not want to rewrite the site from scratch when, two years later, one contributed module might not be supported any more). This allows my upload and embedding one picture in a page, or, in my case, to add images (which are handled as nodes by the module) as children to book pages.

I thought that the later would be perfect - having one page per project giving a description, a nice picture, and than other plans, sections, etc as children. But - to make this become a little bit attractive, I would need the children nodes (the images) be displayed as thumbnails. Is there a way to do that, without modifying the php code (which would break with the next update - and updates are a frequent matter in Drupal)?

Another option would be to get a gallery included into (!) the book page - is there some way to do so? I would need something like the gallery as a block inside a book page. I feel that this is rather far away from the idea of a book page...

The last option would be to use the image modules only to upload and rescale pictures, and display these using html's img tags. It would somehow ignore the content management, and I do not feel that this is a really clean solution, but it would somehow work. As far as I understood I could not use the node id if I want to embed a picture, I would really need the filename in my files/images directory, with the scaling extension (I would use e.g. MyImage.preview.png). This option would also ignore all translation efforts, so if I wanted to add language-specific information this would go into the html-tag, too - the node's information would be ignored.

What is the prefered way to go on for me?

Another related question is - if I keep going on using the image nodes and also the textual information they contain (image title, description), how to translate them. If I click on "translate", I am offered to write a translation as expected - but I would also have to upload the image again. For a three-language-site, keeping three copies of each picture, is really inefficient. Than there was a node-clone module mentioned in one post - is this really necessary to use? It appears strange to me, as, if both the image module and Drupal, support multi language sites, an additional modul to translate a node should really not be needed.

Thank you, CU Lars.