I've been looking to set up a travel photo site for a while, and have been playing around with the Fotki/Photosites of the Web. Ultimately I didn't like any of them...the layouts are kinda ugly, the software is atrocious, etc.

A couple days ago I ran across JAlbum and all I can say is, I second the recommendation! It's free, supports unlimited layouts and designs (and you can make your own) and has built-in features for letting you add comments and captions that get written back to the image itself. Once you're done, it will FTP them for you automatically. If you don't want to caption or rotate photos, it does exactly what the OP requested - point it at a folder, pick a layout, and it will do the rest.

The only problem I have encountered is that it is sometimes slow writing comments back to big (aka 6MP) image files. But not that big a deal, really.