I was quite pleased to see there was a simple gallery out there that did nothing more than serve as a gallery, but at the rate that this install is going, I'd have to say that I'm almost tempted to throw together some rudimentary gallery with thumbnails and images and dozens upon dozens of pages. -_-'

Is there some utterly obvious step that I'm somehow missing? At first I thought it was that my host was doing something crazy in the auto-install; but after removing it and reinstalling it manually, I am still receiving the same error message that tells me that access is forbidden regardless of whether I point to the gallery or to the setup file itself. I've tried manually inputting my information into the config file and creating it manually and all that jazz; still no dice.

Yes, I meet all the system requirements; and yes I can use mod_rewrite [I use it in my regular site code]. And yes, I checked permissions. I'm about to try removing the .htacess file, but I have my doubts that that is the issue as I cannot find anything in the file itself that could be causing the problem.

Edit: And, of course, the universe allows it to work as soon as I make a post. New question, can the .htaccess file be replaced after setup is complete, or will this result in more shenanigans? And what was the deal with the file to begin with? I checked it out myself in Notepad++ and didn't see anything wrong with it.

Sorry, that you had problems. What do you mean with replacing the .htaccess file? That is of course needed if you want to use modrewrite with Zenphoto. If you mean why setup wants to write to that file, that is that is actually should set the rewrite path by that way. Or maybe I did not understand the question?

First off, I really like the back-end there. Nice job! ^^

No, I couldn't even get to setup until I got rid of the .htacess file, which I found odd to begin with since there's nothing in the file that should affect whether or not I can view anything. After removing it, everything worked grand.

I readded the .htacess file [after uploading a few images into a new album] in an attempt to fix something else [clicking the album giving a 'not found' error], only to find that once again it denies access to the entire directory.

I'm checking the access file again, and I still can't find anything conflicting within the code itself.

On local installs (on Mac for example) invisible files like the htaccess one are sometimes just not copied which then leads to issues. You seem to have issues the other way round. I am not sure if we had ever reports about that.

I think this is a problem you need to take up with your ISP. We have in the past had issues with some of the auto install programs. Unfortunatley, they are beyond our control or ability to support. Perhaps the auto install left other things around that still have side effects.

The distributed .htaccess file does no folder exclusions, only rewrite rules.