Blogger is dead simple to set up and use. Pretty trivial to set up with your own URL, too. If you're happy with one of the default themes there's not much you could do to make it easier.
But someone else owns your content. (Possession being 9/10ths and all.) If you want to self-host so you're in charge of your own destiny, you want Wordpress. There's also a lot more widgets and plugins available for Wordpress. So Blogger achieves a shallower learning curve by having a more limited feature set.
Compromise solution: Start with Blogger. When/if you outgrow it, you can import the whole site into Wordpress. Problems with this are that any internal links break in the import. So the longer you go with Blogger the more you're going to have to fix up. This is very much on my mind as I'm about to do the conversion.
Either way, I recommend hosting your photos on your own site and linking to them. If you import them into the blog they get resized according to default values and you end up with auto-generated URLs to the images.
I've written a set of bash scripts to process directories of photos and generate sm/med/lg versions, generate HTML for cut/paste into the blog, and upload the whole mess to my site. Let me know if you're interested in the scripts. Everything's hardcoded, but really simple to edit.