Hi Dino,
There may be a partial solution for you upload restrictions... If you drop an empty file called no_uploads.txt into any directory in your album, users will not be able to upload to that directory. So you can block users from uploading into your vacation album all together this way.
As for the photo associations, it sounds like a UNIX link would do the trick here. Could definitely code that to work on a UNIX system, but there's no equivalent on Windows... I'll add it to the to do list and see if I can figure out a cross platform solution. Right now, it's making my brain hurt to think about the implications.
