Help me! with xml photogallery

I want to display 600 photos in a flash gallery.

The user must be ble to add photos easily.

They will preload load in sets of 12 thumbnails,

clicking on a thumbnail will result in the larger photo loading.

I would like to be able to arrange the photos by date, location and type of shot.

I think I can create a photo class in actionscript with,

photo_url
date
location
Type

And maybe then link to some file containing this information to extract the date for each photograph to display via a flash interface.

But what is the best way to do this. It feels like a problem for XML and flash objects, however I know nothing about XML and would like ur advice as to whether i can solve the problem using these tools.

If I can solve this, are there any good tutorials on how to do this,