I want to have a page that will display thumbnails of photos, and when clicked will show the full-size photos (with only date and description).
I made a collection called photos, but then it generated a photos template and I don’t know what to do from here. I don’t think I want to to use a template because unlike a blog post, it doesn’t have rich text or anything.
Yup you don’t need the collection template if you want to open/view all the photos on one page. Just plop a dynamic list into a normal page, select photos collection, then create a dynamic lightbox using one of the dynamic lightbox tutorials on the forum.