Hi acrylian, thanks for looking into this. As for your questions, no. I didn't move any rename any photos or move them or the site. Like I said, it was strange to me since there were articles that some photos were fine and others were not. I tried to refresh the db without changing anything the links remained broken. Only when I copied the cache files did the db refresh work. I didn't make any changes to the album (I'm only using one album) files.
What I do is write the article. Upload the files I want to use. Insert the thumbs using tinyZenpage and publish. So all the images in each article have nearly the same creation times when I uploaded them to the server.
When looking at the image links in the published page they do indeed show that they point at i.php. I really don't know. I'm tempted to just let the images be cached then copy that one to a new thumbnail directory and use that for the image thumbnail source.
The only other thing I can think of is that the album and images are all unpublished. It didn't seem to be an issue since I don't even have a gallery page and just use an image page to show the individual photos when the thumbnail link is displayed. Maybe this is part of the problem.