Uploading a new image breaks all links to existing images.

[NFG]

I'm sure this has been covered before, but a search revealed only posts that had nothing to do with this problem.  I've also gone through the documentation and found nothing, so please forgive me for asking if it's been covered before.

Coppermine doesn't seem to use permanent links.  For example, if I link to an image in any album, and then upload a new image to that album, the link I used will now point to a different image than it did before the upload.  Put another way, if I link to image 3 and upload a new image, image 3 is now what used to be image 2, and image 3 has become image 4 (since the newest one is always zero).

Since this is such a ridiculous, ludicrous limitation of the gallery I can only assume I'm doing something wrong, but I've been through the config, the admin tools, the forum and the documentation, and I've found no mention of this problem or an way to get a permanent link to an image.  I've got an hour's work ahead of me, finding all the links I've made on countless forums around the world and fixing them all.  =(

Thanks for any suggestions.

EDIT:

Having searched again, I found this post:
http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=26060.0
Which suggests that the only way to get a permalink to an image is to click the category, album, image, then EDIT buttons, and then click or get the link address for the image shown on that page.  Please, please tell me this isn't the only way to do it!!  It's at minimum a three stage process to get this info, why on earth isn't this the default URL for images?

Using my other gallery script (minigal) every image had a permanent link, shown from every page.  Right click the thumb, select "Copy URL" and you've got a permanent link. 

Please tell me Coppermine's not really this frustrating?

[Stramm]

In the current code layout this way to address images is far less resource hungry (cause of the meta albums).
If you need the pics' absolute address then view the intermediate sized image (after clickinkg on a thumb), here click the image info button (if file information is not already open by default), scroll down to the file information area and have a look at the URL, it's teh absolute address and the number after pos=- is it's id (note the -, if a minus is in, then it's the absolute address, if not, relative)

[NFG]

It must be my skin, but I don't have any 'file information area'.  In any case it's still a massive PITA.  Since it's not ever been changed I guess I'm either the only one who shares a lot of image links, or finds the current method cumbersome in the extreme...  A real shame, I liked most everything else about Coppermine.

[Stramm]

nearly every theme has that button to display the file information area. By default it's hidden

Also there are mods to eg. use the absolute addressing. But I do not recommend it due to resource needs. Also there are mods that display copy/ paste bbcode of the images (so that you just have to paste it into a bbs .. same result)
http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=3082.0

[NFG]

Ah, yeah, my bad, it's there and I'm apparently blind.

I'm still confused though - why is

http://url/coppermine/displayimage.php?pos=-50

more of a resource hog than

http://url/coppermine/displayimage.php?album=1&pos=1

?  Maybe my PHP skills are lacking (they are) but what kind of back-end madness goes on that the former is so much more resource unfriendly than the latter?

(Thanks for the help, BTW, please don't think me ungrateful)

[Stramm]

here's some more info
http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=5832.0

[NFG]

After checking that URL...  I'm totally gobsmacked, I never even considered google results, having floating URLs is even more preposterous with this in mind.  What were they thinking?

It's nice to see that there's a plugin for this, but wow - experimental doesn't begin to describe it!  When enabled I can't even click on categories, I get a 404.  As for editing the source to fix this, I've been down that road before.  Having all my changes erased when the script's updated really sucks.

The more I play with CM the more I like it, but man, this is a really amazing deficiency.