A photo album is merely a collection of photographs (or images). They may be connected they may not. A series of photographs is a useful way of displaying how to undertake a particular activity or as a way of showing instructions.
For example showing learners the techniques for a recipe can be enhanced with a series of photographs that shows the different stages within the process.
The learner can then click an image to see an enlarged version.
This example made use of the Lightbox Gallery plugin.
By placing a photo album on the VLE it makes it very easy for the learners to find and see them, but also unlike an online photo service such as (the free version of) Flickr won’t have restrictions on the number of albums (sets) you can have and therefore could potentially confuse the learners about which images they should be looking at.
Having said that if you have a Pro Flickr account or are using another service such as Picasa then embedding a collection of images into the VLE can be done easily using the provided embed codes that these services provide. This is a set of images I have on Flickr that makes use of the iPhone Paper Camera App.
The disadvantage is that, of course clicking the images takes the learner away from the VLE, but they could probably find their way back.