If you are taking a photograph that is being stored in a RAW format - unusual for most consumer cameras, but possible if your camera is a good one - then you will have to convert the image to something that Scribus can use. You can see which image types Scribus can use by creating an image frame, then right-clicking and choosing "Get Image..." from the context-sensitive menu. The list of usable image types can be found in the "Files of Type" drop-down. If your image is not in one of the formats listed then you will have to convert it but that would be rare as Scribus can use most normal image types.
You do not need to convert an image to PDF for use in Scribus. You can convert it to a PDF for other uses but Scribus can handle normal images perfectly well. If you have an image converted to PDF then Scribus should be able to use it but the conversion is not necessary.
I do not know which tutorials you are going through but if you thought that conversion to PDF was, for some reason, necessary then I would suggest that the tutorials might need some adjustment to make it clearer that no conversion is needed.
IMPORTANT: Do not cut and paste images into Scribus unless you absolutely need to for some specific reason. You should normally only use the "Get Image..." function instead. (Pasting an image into Scribus is useful for some reasons but you probably will not need to do so.)
As for creating an album, I cannot really give any specific advice as each type of album is different. One bit of general advice would be to create some standard layouts and copy those layouts to the Scrapbook so you can use them again and again. This article might be useful
https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Photo_Albums although I have not been through it myself to see how good the advice is.