Actually, sometimes id DOES hurt because at times it would show the thumbnail of a picture i had, then when the user clicks on it, it would say file not found.
At least that's what happened to me before. To fix it, I went into the db and deleted the orphaned id's, cleared the thumbnail cache, then reloaded the albums and all was fine.
It should [b]not[/b] affect the way images are displayed -- all of that is pulled straight from the hard disk, and the database is only secondary.
Trust me, the extra rows in the DB don't have any effect.
As far as what Mania said, that's not possible either... it's probably some other bug (ugh). Well, as long as it's working for now...
Tristan, this is what I was talking about. This is how I found out about the orphaned ID.
http://www.zenphoto.org/support/topic.php?id=577#post-3183
little more insight
This will only affect plugins which read directly from the database and not zenphoto itself. When you view his/her gallery, it works fine.. you get a zenphoto error because you are linking from something externally which is generating a link based upon the database information. This does not apply to Zenphoto itself because it looks at the file system first.
you would use the database for comments, descriptions, timestamps, special image names. Basically, the way I see it.. the image table is really only used to reference either a special name (changed name) of the image and linking it to comments and storing the descriptions... reading filesystem stuff for that is what makes it really slow.
PS. you are driving my RSS reader wild with all your WIKI stuff. Great idea though. I will prolly contribute later tonight.. That will make things much easier.. Good idea..