as you can see in my test environment, the sidebar module that shows the gallery albums, has a counter next to it, this counter only shows the number of images directly below that album... is there a way for it to show a "total" count?

http://www.photo9.be/zen/Rik/Tenerife/IMG_7591.jpg.php

The plugin print_album_menu is responsible for the display of the albums. Sorry, there is no option for that. You would have to hack the plugin to get that by using a db query probably.