Automatically Assign Images to Existing Albums by IPTC keywords

Hi,
My first post here, so please be patient w/ my noobness. I've searched a bit, and I do know about the Tags & Keyword Album modules. I would imagine the following is a common scenario:
I have a _lot_ of images painstakingly categorized and keyworded in a DAM app (imatch). I don't mind recreating/editing the album tree in Gallery2. What I'm trying hard to accomplish is to have images automatically assigned to the right categories in Gallery2 as they are uploaded. Since each image could easily belong to a dozen or more categories (Animals, Birds, Raptors, Eagles, Nests, Eggs, NationalParks, Canon, 600mm, etc., etc.)assigning each image manually to all these albums is not practical, and represents a colossal duplication of effort. The process needs to be automated/scripted somehow based on the IPTC info.
The Keyword Albums is probably not what I'm looking for, since I want nicely organized pages of thumbnails representing albums/sub-albums....../images that a user can navigate intuitively w/ breadcrumb trail. All the examples of existing solutions I've been able to find in Gallery require either visible keywords under each image, or tag clouds, which I'm trying to avoid. I'd even settle for an expandable taxonomy tree in a sideblock without thumbnails (a la Drupal).
Can anyone point me to a solution? I'm hoping I missed something. G2 and PGLightbox are a phenomenally versatile/configurable combo, which I've really fallen in love with from playing with it a bit on a demo site. Unfortunately, if I can't find a way to implement the above work flow, I'll be forced to use Coppermine, which is a big step down in configurability, but it has the above functionality (I'm pretty sure...)

All help is greatly appreciated. I've been putting this project off for too long.

Thanks