What is it actually?

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I have SMF installed and running standalone and also the Gallery, ran the integration manager and followed the instructions but I don't actually see anything different. So my question is, and it's probably a dumb one, what does integrating the gallery with your board actually do? I thought that maybe when you wanted to post a picture on the board, it would post it in the Gallery also or give you an option. Here is the link to my Gallery with the integration enabled.

http://turtsntorts.com/coppermine/

[Joachim Müller]

what does integrating the gallery with your board actually do?

2.2.6 Consider bridging

Coppermine was designed to be used as standalone application in the first place. However, many people wanted to integrate it with another app, so starting with cpg1.1.x coppermine came with a mechanism that allowed users to bridge coppermine with another app in terms of user management. The main advantage is giving your site visitors a single sign-on for your overall site (e.g. both in your gallery and your forum), so they don't have to sign in twice and memorize two different logons.

Bridging does not integrate coppermine visually into your home page (you have to create a custom theme to accomplish this).

You can enable (or disable) bridging at any time, but you should make up your mind on bridging when installing Coppermine in the first place, because there are some issues that have to be taken into account: if you already have users inside your coppermine database when enabling bridging, the correlation between those initial coppermine users and the "new" users from the app you bridge with gets lost. As a consequence, there will be no more correlation between things your "old" users did (uploading pic, posting comments etc.) and the "new" users from the bridge.

To circumvent those future issues, you should make up your mind when installing coppermine: do you want to allow user interaction? Do you plan to offer a bulletin board later (or any other application that keeps track of users)? If your answer is "yes", or "maybe", then it's advisable to enable bridging before actually promoting your site publicly and starting to let users in.

Read up details in the bridging section of the docs.

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Thanks for the explanation. I guess I really don't need to integrate then so I'll disable it.