I am having real trouble making the permissions work for my requirements. I have two options that I would be happy with If I could make them work:

1. An admin user be able to Create an album and add photos to it (without assistance from sysadmin to grant them 'manage album' rights).
2. An admin user be able to upload photos to an album they have manage rights to. BUT, not be able to create new albums.

This just doesn't seem possible with the current permissions available.

1. If I give an Admin user 'Edit' and 'Upload' rights then they can Create an Album, but they cannot upload photos to it until they are granted 'Manage Album' rights.
2. I could deal with a scenario where users cannot create albums, I could create them for the user, grant 'Manage Albums' rights and away they go. Problem with this solution is that users will have the form fields available to create a new Album and they can still do this which will ultimately leave us with many orphaned albums.

Am I missing something here or are my requirements just not possible with ZenPhoto at the moment?

The closest I have come to what I want is to create an album for a user, grant them manage album rights for that album and then everything is as I expect. The user can then create a 'sub'-album and upload photos to it without needing to be granted 'manage' rights (obviously because they have rights to the parent album).

As I write this it is becoming clearer, perhaps the issue is that the upload form for a user with 'manage' rights to no albums needs to be a bit clearer that the user will not be able to do anything until they have been granted access to an album (this is for a user with only 'edit' and 'upload' rights).
A better solution to this problem might be to include a 'Create Album' permission, this would certainly avoid some of this confusion. One step better again might be to automatically grant 'Manage Album' to a user when they create an album, I mean really, what is the point of someone being able to create an album AND PUBLISH IT, but not be able to upload photos?

Thanks for any help or ideas.
Zenphoto version 1.2.4 [3716] (Official Build)
Current gallery theme: default
PHP version: 5.2.6

Clearly a user without full rights should not be able to create an album anywhere but within one of his managed albums. We will correct this.

Actually I am just looking at a similar issue and I would like a user to have the possibility to create an album, now I only have the opportunity to set him as a manager for all albums, which gives him the power to delete and edit them. If there is a possibilty to do just this, please tell me.

Thanks!

You can set him as a manager of one top level album then he will be able to create sub albums within that.

Thanks for your quick answer. Yes, I tried this. But the problem here is, that he can also delete this top level album by mistake. I want to have one login for several users, who can upload albums. It would be nice if they can also create those albums on the start page, not on a sub gallery.

That is not possible then. Regarding the accidental deletion of an album: Well, a few things a user needs to think about himself, don't you think?...;-)

Yes, I agree. But in german we call this "DAU" (Dümmster anzunehmender User = dumbest imaginable user) so when I will grant upload rights to ten people, maybe one will accidentaly delete the whole album.

I know what a DAU is as I am German, too..:-) But sometimes some advisory is unavoidable. I think the best would be to assign to each of them one top level album, then they can't even delete albums of others accidentally..:-)