If you're interested in rolling your own, this tutorial is pretty easy. You'd just have to add a row for your metadata.

http://www.phpdeveloper.org/view_tut.php?id=38

This seems like a rather easy script to code, yes? Off the top of my head and untested, assuming a pipe-delimited file of image_name, title, year, comments:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

# open and slurp file.
open(FILE, "</path/to/file") or die $!;
my @records = <FILE>; close(FILE);

# get random entry.
my $rand = rand( scalar @records );

# now, split the entry.
my ($image, $title, $year, $comments)
= split(/\|/, $records[$rand]);

print "your html code here";
print "href = $image, alt = $title, etc.";

exit;

You could either run this through cron hourly, or every page load. Lemme know if it doesn't work, or if you need more help (CC me through email, if possible).

Nice to see you back, Cam. I am, however, surprised that you are not using a liquid layout. (I have a 1280x1024 monitor setting but keep my windows at 800 px wide, so the content column doesn't fit.)

I've always been concerned about Gallery and the fact that it doesn't create search engine friendly URLs (see my matching tutorial below). Cam, any thoughts on this? As much as it looks good, I get a heavy portion of hits to my disobey.com/horror/ from Google Images, and I fear those'll disappear.

http://evolt.org/article/x/20/15882/

I use a gallery manager that I put together a while back using perl and XML here: http://www.majcher.com/xhibition/ - the code for the current release should be linked at the bottom of the page. It's a little assy right now, but you could make it do exactly what you want with the random images in about five lines, I think.

(After looking at the code again: I really need to get back to work on cleaning that up. It's a little embarrassing...)