Just by looking at the database it looks like you, well im not sure what "mtime" is...
if not you could sort by the date/time of the picture taken...Anyways, there is a table called "images" with all the images, they all have album id's "albumid" which corresponds with the "albums" table, with the field of "id"
Ex:
get the list, sorting by the mdate or date taken, to show most recent, get the last 100 entries, and then for each image you receive, get the albumid for that image, and then you can figure out the album for it and then use that information to create a thumbnail and links...
This is of course my newb suggestion which I dont know a lot about PHP

Not to mention it would probably take some implemention to use zenphotos functions or to create new ones...
Im no zenphoto/php/sql pro... I can just look around