If you want a word analog I would highly recommended
Libre Office it has better features and a better development community behind it than Open Office.
As for taking a long time to load each picture it is most likely your pictures are very large if you just grab them from your camera and put them in the journal. I would suggest resizing them appropriately (72 - 102dpi should work well).
For organizing your photos and reformatting/resizing them I would give
Picasa a try. It works fairly well and has Google backing it so it is a well supported project.
Thanks
JK