I agree - it's too long.  But I don't think this is specifically because it's an album - it's because it's a collection.

In Controller_Search::action_index() and Controller_Tag::action_show(), we see that a large block of this code is essentially triplicated.  IMHO, we should unify all three of these in View_Theme.  This would also make contrib modules like favorites a bit simpler.

I'm knee deep in forms, dialogs, and routing at the moment and haven't really looked into it much more than that... wanna take a stab?