I know how to do this manually, but is there another way from wihtin ZP to hide the display of the gallery page and have users by default go to the one album page on a site?
I have a site under development with just a single album of many images, so there is no need for a user to even see the gallery page.
See the Zenpage theme's index.php how to include other pages. You also need to setup the album object environment. Look at the makeAlbumCurrent() function or use a header() redirect in the index page to redirect to the album page by url.
Note that all tools of Zenphoto like sitemap or else will not care that you don't want to use the album page.