If you are having problems with the renaming then there is some sort of error occurring on your site since certainly this does work for most.

For us to be of any help solving this we will need to know the error itself. Depending on the error, it may show up in the Zenphoto debug log or only in your server's CGI error logs.

The recommended approach to this is to reset your error logs to empty and do the apply for your album changes (and nothing more than this.) That will give you logs with only pertinent information. Otherwise the extraneous entries can cause you to overlook the actual issue.

Ah, there's some stuff in the security log that might help? Looks like album access is being blocked and "the permissions of file security records (registry?) are 0640" Does admin-edit.php need to be something other than 644? Hmm, my other install uses 644 so not sure what that's actually telling me. "Establishing security permissions" failed.

fecha solicitante IP typo usuario ID usuario nombre resultado autoridad informacion adicional
2013-07-18 13:54:34 75.129.57.249 Reinicializar registro admin Nathan Bruley Éxitoso zp_admin security.log
Establecer permisos de seguridad de registro Fallado Los permisos de archivos de registro de seguridad son 0640
2013-07-18 13:54:50 75.129.57.249 Album access admin Nathan Bruley Blocked /zp-core/admin-edit.php
2013-07-18 13:55:00 75.129.57.249 Album access admin Nathan Bruley Blocked /zp-core/admin-edit.php?action=newalbum&folder&name=nuevo álbum&albumtab=false&XSRFToken=56e053d8268997c2cda137b9650fa6c5c6b90aeb
2013-07-18 13:55:00 75.129.57.249 Album access admin Nathan Bruley Blocked /zp-core/admin-edit.php?page=edit&album=nuevo-album
2013-07-18 13:55:04 75.129.57.249 Album access admin Nathan Bruley Blocked /zp-core/admin-edit.php?page=edit&action=save&album=nuevo-album
2013-07-18 13:55:04 75.129.57.249 Album access admin Nathan Bruley Blocked /zp-core/admin-edit.php?page=edit&album=nuevo-album&saved&tagsort&tab=albuminfo
2013-07-18 13:55:40 75.129.57.249 Registro descargado admin Nathan Bruley Éxitoso zp_admin security.log

0644 would allow anyone on your server to read the logs--probably not a good situation which is why Zenphoto does try to change it.

From your logs, Zenphoto is not being allowed to make permission changes by your site. This may well be related to not being able to rename album folders, but would not be involved in simply changing database items like descriptions.

The blocked access is another story. Check that your admin account does have all the proper rights set--for the site administrator all boxes should be checked.

So you are saying that according to my logs, a security setting may be preventing me from changing an album name? That is indeed what I am trying to do (when I update the album, it erases the album name).

Re blocked access, do you mean boxes checked in options - security? The only one unchecked is cookie security. If you mean something else, could you please give me a link to info on how to do that? Or actually you probably meant under users-- yes, all those boxes are checked.

As sbillard said, database issues shouldn't be related to permissions but in the case of renames I can only think to suggest confirming permissions are uniform across all album folders by opening your command prompt and typing:

chmod -R 755 /ZENPHOTOLOCATION/albums

Any directories you have to go through to get to your albums folder would be placed in the ZENPHOTOLOCATION bit...or just change to the zenphoto directory and:

chmod -R 755 albums

The syntax being:

chmod -R <permissionsettings> <dirname>

That will at least make sure everything permissions related is possible with regards to modifying those folders. Couldn't hurt and worth a try I'd say. I've seen this issue before, especially when the script owner and the FTP upload owner vary and default permissions kick in on certain folders and not others which is a common Linux configuration issue.

My file manager confirms all folders are 755 and files are 644. Even if I create a new album and edit the name, the name disappears and then zenphoto errors saying there is an unnamed album.

Hmm..well thank you for confirming that. Not sure where you are being disallowed at then, especially the database writes not going through. Tried to make similar settings in my 1.4.5 release and couldn't replicate the issue to test anything for you.

I appreciate you trying anyway...

I see that the contact form plugin doesn't take any text either, and images don't accept title text, so this has a wider scope than I thought... but I can make changes like changing theme or setting to be under construction.

I have passed this issue on to my host to see if they can come up with a solution. I will let you know if they figure it out.

I had the exact same problem. It was fixed in my case by making the album folders chmod 0775 and the files chmod 0664
The advice given previously by another user to do chmod -R 0755 is wrong as that will set all files within the folder and sub folders to 0755 as well as the folders which is not what you want.
On my ISP the web server is a member of the group and so when permissions are set for a folder as 0755, that is
owner group other
rwx r-x r-x

the web server is unable to write to the directory and so image updates fail.
As far as I know the instructions in the docs at http://www.zenphoto.org/news/permissions-for-zenphoto-files-and-folders are not correct, as they say " 0644 files/0755 directories ([rw-r--r--] files and [rwxr-xr-x] directories) permissions, with [youruser:webservergroup] ownership" on the one hand, but then follow that with "keep ownership of the files yourself, give group access to the web server, and shut everyone else out." Sadly the "0644 files/0755 directories" disallows by definition "group access to the web server" and so will not work except where the webserver is running as owner which would be very unusual. To do as is initially suggested will normally require 0664 files/0775 directories. I have just filed a bug about this doc issue.

That would be strange since I never got any problems with this on normal shared hosts. Too bad not all servers are configured the same way. I leave to answer sbillard though who is the primary author of the setup stuff anyway.

The permission settings recommended by Zenphoto are the ones that generally will work and provide the best site security. The document you reference does note that these may not work on all servers.

Particularly if your server is configured using groups and different user IDs for the web application and the FTP application setting the security so that only the owner can change the file will cause issues with FTP uploaded files.

The "Proper" solution is for the server to be configured so that you, the site owner, have a single user id and it is used for all your actions. All other solutions open the site for various degrees of hacking.