This is a follow up tutorial on the popular Create an album based image gallery in Drupal 6 using CCK and views but for Drupal 7. The tutorial will assume that you have Drupal 7 already installed and ready for use. The following contrib modules are required:

• Views
• Ctools
• Colorbox

I personally prefer Colorbox to some of the other lightbox modules, but feel free to use whichever one you want, they should all work in the same way. An alternative can be found in Shadowbox. Lightbox2 doesn't have a D7 release at the time of writing and Thickbox has been discontinued, with the maintainer now working on Colorbox.