For sure something on my host server symlinks is not working as expected.
I copied the directory that had image files that were giving me grief.
I copied the files that were a problem and renamed them without spaces or '(' or ')' (by default my mac renamed images that had the same sequence number with a space and (sequence number) e.g. photo (2).jpg. And I left the "badly" names files there.
After uploading that album and cache to my test copy on the host server I can see that the "poorly" named files still fail while the well named files, use - and not space, underscore or ( or ) then all seems to work for those files.
>I can only assume that symlinks may not be working correctly on >your server although it say they do. Check the permissions of the >files maybe.
Once again - You are correct!
It is enough to know the rules not so important to me to know why it doesn't work (though I think it is clearly a difference caused by the host server implementation or configuration of symlinks).
Let me try renaming all the image files giving me grief and see if the {{ERROR}} problem goes away for good.
FYI the permissions of the files
thumbs - 644
symlink - 777
album directory - 755
I also tried all combinations of the 2 settings for Options > Image > Full image protection and none appeared to make a difference.