I recently found a really cool "fan-stack" (that's my name for it) gallery teaser widget.
It's from megadrupal's blog and can be found here.
You can have as many images as you like (if your content type is set up that way) but only the top 3 are visible. Click on the images below to see the bonus 4th image!
I've deviated from megadrupal's demo in several areas, but the basic principle is the same.
It's really clever, and all done using CSS.
I have dispensed with creating a view as described in the article because I wanted to attach it to a single node/piece of content - like I have here. I have also changed the template override code to show more of the node elements. Apart from the images (of course), I show the Title and Body, (some) of the links, and some additional text that comes after the gallery teaser.
A view could be used to show multiple albums/galleries and, with minor tweaks, a node like this could be used as a cover page or overview for each.
Now I'm just itching to find a project to use it on...