I set up zenphoto with the Stopdesign Theme Sjard Bleecken
Version 0.9, 10/10/2005. It worked great for a few weeks.

One day I took a peek at it and found this error

Fatal error: Call to a member function getCustomImage() on a non-object in /var/www/vhosts/condosrehobothbeach.com/httpdocs/zenphoto/zen/template-functions.php on line 596

I changed absolutely nothing. One day it worked, a week later it was trashed. I'm not sure if it was hacked, if my admin made some changes to the version of php? But one day it worked and now it does not. I did change the default admin and password so if it was hacked it was not simple to do.

I can use the default theme but for some reason only 1/8th of the photos that used to display are still shown.

When I go into the admin section to try to repair the damage it will not allow me to delete an album.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

www.condosrehobothbeach.com/zenphoto

Hmm... I'm not an expert, but it sounds more like a hardware problem to me. Could it be that the hard drive that the files are stored on could have some bad sectors and damaged the files?

i use the same theme. try reuploading the files on the /zen folder.
i always make a back up on mine everytime i update my gallery. i also had a test site where i can test first if i am adding features or making any changes.

The site is hosted on a rackspace server (one of the best in the country) so I doubt it was a bad hard drive.

I did a new install here www.condosrehobothbeach.com/zenphoto2 but at the moment it won't let me upload and display any photos.

I do have another instance of the program running here http://www.building-zone.com/zenphoto/ but now I'm worried that it may fail at some time in the future as well.

I've installed zen photo at least 5 different times and sometimes it works well other times it does not. Most likely it's just me screwing something up but the www.condosrehobothbeach.com/zenphoto site really did get wacky without any input from me.

Zenphoto does not "fail" sporadically like that, it's simply not possible; something changed outside it to affect the environment it was running under.

It could be an .htaccess file in a higher directory... check those.

Have we tried re-installing Zenphoto yet? Especially from the latest version? Please try that, it seems like you have an old version...

That aside, I've narrowed it down to a problem with getting the album thumbnail image... the first album works because you've selected a thumbnail for it manually. If you can, do that for the others and see if that works.

If you can get to your server through FTP or SSH (Shell) make sure the permissions on the /albums directory *and all albums within it* are readable by the web server (generally permissions of 755 for individual folders, with 777 for the /albums folder itself). It's also important that the server has execute permissions (hence the '5' in the last place) for each folder folder, so it may list the folder contents.

Sounds like you're generally just having permissions problems. The server needs to be able to read the directories and list their contents. Could be that the permissions got changed somehow, that's not uncommon.

You need not worry about zenphoto "failing some time in the future." That's really not possible unless you change something such as those permissions, even accidentally.

Also, I wouldn't worry about Zenphoto being hacked. It's quite secure.

It's been about a month since I've had time to try to fix this.

I just made sure "the permissions on the /albums directory *and all albums within it* are readable by the web server (generally permissions of 755 for individual folders, with 777 for the /albums folder itself)"

What should I have in my htaccess file?

Do you offer a fix it for cash solution? I'm happy to send some money for a quick solution. mike@bwbeach.com

I've had my zp config set to $conf['mod_rewrite'] = false; but I've tried true as well with no difference.

I'd love to help, but I'm leaving on a business trip tomorrow. If I have time during the week I'll shoot you an email.

Thank you very much. I use the gallery for business and having it down could be costing me money. I'd rather pay to get it fixed than spend another month trying to figure out my mistakes on my own. As you said it's probably something as simple as permissions, but for the life of me I can't figure it out.

Next time I will certainly be backing up my work.

I even tried a reinstall on the same server at http://www.condosrehobothbeach.com/zenphoto2/ with the same error message.

It's odd because as I mentioned earlier I have successfully set this all up before with no problems. example = http://www.building-zone.com/zenphoto/ which is still up and running just fine.

Costal, I believe I know the problem. I will contact you soon so I can go in and fix it...