I would like to download an actual manual. Do you have a link to one?

No manual, Sorry. The closest is http://www.zenphoto.org/category/User-Guide/

hee, hee, it's a trade-off for having improvements & new features added The developers/users have been great replying to questions on this forum, so that helps too w/o having a manual.

As this thread here is over one year old, is it really that nobodys seems to have a problem with the missing manual?
I know one can solve almost any problem with going through the website and searching one's way through the Forum here. So first of all a big thanks to all the active people here (and a special thanks to the developers).

But wouldn't it be nice to find a hint on how to e.g. add tags properly (by separating them with commas instead of semicolons or spaces or whatever you could come up with) without having to wade through posts that are sometimes years old?

If there is no one willing to maintain such a thing, and I am perfectly aware why this is, may I suggest a wiki?

So everyone stumbling across one problem and solving it could write a small part of the documentation and all the others could overhaul it as soon as this is necessary...

After a few months I guess we would have a decent manual, that just contains the howtos without having to read through tons of posts that hover around a problem...

What do you think?

Sounds like a good plan if you can actually get people to do the writing. Unfortunately, so far the volunteers have not come through. A Wiki would be the best approach. Unfortunately we have had to "clamp" down on the Zenphoto Wiki because of Spam problems.

This is interesting.

There once was a wiki?
And it had to be shut down due to spam?

I wonder how the big wikis get around that prob.
Every wiki should have that problem...

Done a bit of searching. There is some german guy who seems to have spam problems with his wiki based on mediawiki (a very common wiki engine I think...) and he seems to have found a solution to the problems by doing some minor changes to the mediawiki code.

You can find the story here:
http://wiki.njh.eu/Spam_im_Wiki

Seems effective. No new additions since June 2009.

Actually we try to make Zenphoto as selfexplanatory as possible. Of course it assumes that you have some general knowledge before hand.

As my collegue said, everytime we asked people who complained to get involved nothing happened. Seems that a lot of people want everything but not do anything by themselves.

Btw, we don't use MediaWiki but the Trac software. If you want to help write a manual we surely could enable your account to allow wiki editing. Please see the "Get involved" page for info.