Hey mrmiyagi,
It took my blog lots of SEO designed posts to get there, but if you put in the time eventually the Google traffic does come! I have over 200 posts and I now get over 40000 uniques from Google.
As for TGPs, you could still create galleries (outside of your blog but on the same domain) and submit these to TGP's. This is what I do
To show you what I mean, here's my blog
http://www.wehateporn.com
And my galleries are located where this one is
http://www.wehateporn.com/galleries2...imsuit_NN.html