I have recently came across COPPERMINE ... may be a GOLDMINE. It has solved my worries for setting up an easy to use album in my home network.
The only thing that I did not like was use of HTTP_POST_VARS, HTTP_GET_VARS, etc.
I have made updated the sources to use $_POST, $_GET, $_SERVER, $_COOKIE intead.
Would the updates be of interest to anyone? incl. the development team?
This has already been done for the next major version.
And we won't be releasing another 1.3.x version so we really don't need those changes. Thanks for the offer, though.