Build it in Django. Django was born at a local newspaper, and was specifically designed for the kind of projects that online newspapers tend to have (relatively straight forward publishing model, super-tight deadlines, extensible to handle all kinds of crazy unexpected requirements in the future).

A small photo sharing app that deals with occasional intense traffic spikes sits bang in the middle of Django's sweet spot (I'd suggest investigating the Django cache_page decorator, or maybe looking at integrating with Varnish).