Create a 'universal' reusable View? Is it possible to create a View that essentially a skeleton, and can be reused over and over again (on different parts of the site) simply using different input i.e. something like different node ID's? 

I want to be able to create a new Views Slideshow Gallery (The gallery is a jQuery slider) just by adding content to my custom content type, Photos. The way I have it set up now, I have to create a new Photos content type, keep it not published, and then plug that Node ID to a brand new View using the Views Slideshow formatting. As you can imagine this is quite a laborious task. 

This question has applications outside my specific uses. The core question is, can you create a (dynamic?) view that will automatically take different inputs for use in a content type?
What you may be looking for is "Contextual Filters"

Here's a good tutorial I have that explains how to implement them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJFMTDuaxy8

There's also a way to call a View directly from a template, which can be pretty useful in some cases:

views_embed_view("slideshow_gallery", "page", array() );