I have a fairly large amount of media files (films & audio) that I'd like to present in zenphoto. They're already on my server however, and not in the zenphoto albums directory of course. Is it possible for these to be included in an album without going through the time and resources of actually re-uploading all of them to a zenphoto folder?

Most likely (given what you say is in there) you will not be able to do this.

For things that are "played" by the browser, the browser must have access to the file itself. If you can set up your server so that these files are in the "WEB path" then you can use the external album capability of Zenphoto and use that folder as your "albums" folder. Zenphoto has only one albums folder, though, so all your items would have to be housed in that folder.

Please see the commentary in the zp-config.php file for how you would do this. Also do a search on "external album" to see what else has been discussed on the subject.

Thanks. I found the information about zp-config.php after posting this, but was unclear whether I could have two album folders.

From a user's perspective it would be extremely handy to have multiple album folders, especially for those of us trying to present existing collections using zenphoto. Any chance of seeing this in a future release?

No, as Zenphoto is filesystem based and working with two folders is really overhead. Btw, you can also just move the content of your existing folder setup into the root "albums" folder of Zenphoto. Zenphoto will automatically make albums from these folders and its contents (if Zenphoto supports the media file formats of course).

Update: I believe some users have had success by using symlinks for this. Maybe try that, too (never did myself though).