I have had a fish around on the forums and found some similar topics but nothing that answers my question.

My goal is to have a home page that displays 6 (prefably specified) albums; 'Recent Projects.' Plus also a seperate page that displays all the albums (more than 6 per page) in the gallery; 'Portfolio.' This sounds like it should be easy but my php knowledge cant find a solution.

Take a look at the Stopdesign theme. It does part B of your design--the gallery page with all the albums. As to part A, you will have to code a specfic index.php script that uses the object model to output those specific albums.