Is there a way to do this...say my gallery is at www.domain.com/zenphoto and I have a few albums, e.g. www.domain.com/zenphoto/2010-trip and www.domain.com/zenphoto/2011-trip

When I'm finished creating an album, I mail the link to that specific album to my family/friends to make it easy for them to find.

Right now, I have my users set up, and they can only login by going to the *admin* page, which is confusing for newbies. If they go directly to the urls above, they're asked for a password *only*, which doesn't work. I enabled the login-out plugin to try to fix this and now when they go to the urls above, it asks for a login *and* password, but none of their logins/passwords work. Their logins/passwords *do* work if they go to www.domain.com/zenphoto/admin, but then they have to go to the gallery again and find the proper album. Too many steps.

Is there a way to make it so that all 3 direct urls above will push you to a proper (i.e. one that works) login page?

Did you read this already?
http://www.zenphoto.org/news/an-overview-of-zenphoto-users#guest_users

@acrylian: Hi, yes I have. I did set up a guest login and pw, but here's what happens:
1. go to www.domain.com/zenphoto and login with the guest login: works
2. go to www.domain.com/zenphoto and login as regular user: doesn't work
3. go to www.domain.com/zenphoto and login as admin: works
4. go to www.domain.com/zenphoto/2010-trip: you only get asked for password, no login. No active passwords work

I have no time to try that yet. My collegue sbillard is the login expert so will surely respond later.
We of course assume that your are on the lastest release. If not upgrade first.

There is no difference between the login that occurs if you use the user login/out form with user field enabled or the back-end form. In fact, they are the exact same form.

Enable the security logger and see what it reports of the login attempts.

@sbillard: I created a new user called "bob" for testing. (note that bob is *not* an admin login) Here's what the security log shows

1. go to www.domain.com/zenphoto and login as bob: doesn't work
2012-03-05 17:19:29 166.250.xx.xx Guest login bob Failed (password)

2. go to www.domain.com/zenphoto/2010-trip: you only get asked for password, no login.

2012-03-05 17:19:45 166.250.xx.xx Guest login Failed (password!
(note that I tried this twice, with bob's pw and the guest password set up in Options - Gallery

3. go to www.domain.com/zenphoto/admin and login as bob: success, and it takes me directly to http://domain.com/zenphoto/zp-core/admin-comments.php, which seems a bit strange.

2012-03-05 17:19:58 166.250.xx.xx Admin login bob Success zp_admin

So you have both a guest user "bob" and an admin user "bob"? If so, the zenphoto "bob" will have to go to the admin pages to login.

"Bob" is the only user name with that name. The admin has a completely different user name. But that's part of the problem: I've got 4 users and one admin, all with different names, and none of them can log in except via the admin login page.

I simply cannot reproduce this. So probably there is some bit of information that is critical that you have left out. Perhaps a detailed step-by-step recounting with exactly what you see at each step.

I can understand you, edjusted.. I have similar problem: wanted to have several users: Mary, John, admin ...only admin could enter admin mode admin-edit.php.. Mary would have her own albums, John would have his own albums... Mary could see only her albums ...I thought, Zen photo allows to have several user accounts - e.g. after login he can only add files, without entering admin mode admin-edit.php