The photo gallery is definitely something we'll be improving on over time. It's in a it's infancy stage right now. For beta 3 we do have GD working to keep the image in it's same format that it was uploaded in, and also in most cases will preserve transparency (thanks to Ian Spence). Still need to work on ImageMagick for this.
Linking to the original unaltered file would be somewhat of a problem. In *most* cases it will make the filesize much smaller. Taking a 1 MB picture and shrinking the full size down to under 300k depending on the quality setting in the control panel.
Other things suggested in here will be coming eventually. I know this first release will have some issues and won't be as flexible as everyone wants it to be, but just trying to keep releases coming fairly quick.
