hi. first of all, wow, great piece of software, and something almost exactly what i was going to write myself! however, i'd like to suggest a few things.
first installation went very smoothly (never read the docs!) however, after i put in a un / pw, having to create a new admin user wasn't very intuitive, and caused me a bit of confusion at first.
i immediately dumped some dirs and sub dirs of images into the albums dir, and was amazed that they all showed up! excellent - this is the intuition i was after, not having to import images one by one unlike other gallery software...
also, i really like the zip file import, however, as you've got subalbums, which is perfect for manual catagorisation - exactly what i want - i'd like to be able to have subdirs in the zip file, and have sub albums auto created from them. so could you check for dir names in the zip, and create sub albums accordingly? that'd be awesome!
also, on a gallery page, my cpu goes way over the top, shooting up to 100%. this is a windows machine on localhost with xampp, but still, i've never seen anything like that before! why is it?
also, i think having random thumbs for each page view is a great idea, but a bit too cpu intensive if you've got a lot of visitors and/or albums with a lot of images, so, could you have a random thumb of the hour/day instead? so thumbs can be cached more often?
and when you choose the thumbs for an album, the preview i see in teh dropdown in ff, is different to the actual thumb, so i sometimes have to do a bit of guess work.
another suggestion, which would be amazing is, if for each image, i could define a crop point to tighten up the thumbs, ie, top centre, top right, middle right etc. that'd help.
also, something which would speed up bulk album creation would be, if in the dir names from manual upload, for the album titles, if it could convert underscore to space in the that would be very useful.
ok, these are just a few i guess minor, but-would-make-a-huge-difference quibbles, and, i'd like to say thanks once again, rarely have i seen software that i will actually use!