Custom Weblog Field - List Categories?

I have an IMAGE GALLERY setup in a weblog, with each “album” being a category.

I then have a NEWS weblog, with entries that I want to link to an ALBUM.

Basically I need a custom weblog field that lists a certain category group as a select drop down, with the category id as the option value.

I understand the alternatives: 1) manually insert the category id, but that is tedious and not user friendly 2) do a relationship to one entry in the gallery weblog, but that too is not ideal because the titles of the gallery entries are not descriptive of the “album” (category) name. 3) add the gallery category group to the news weblog, which alters how I want this displayed in the CP (which is what I will do if this doesn’t work) 4) give up

Any help or direction with this simple data link would be much appreciated!