I've read many good things about Zenphoto so I decided to install it today and try it out.

I'm exploring the possibilities of various themes and extensions; one thing which I have not yet found an easy way to implement is touch gestures - for example, swiping to scroll through an album on an iPad.

There was one thread a few months back (http://www.zenphoto.org/support/topic.php?id=11296#post-65285) which gave some hints abou how to modify a theme by coding in some references to jquery-mobile, but I was hoping to find a ready-made solution. There were also a couple of threads where the question was raised, but it did not seem that any developments were imminent:
http://www.zenphoto.org/support/topic.php?id=48143#post-109029
http://www.zenphoto.org/support/topic.php?id=40263#post-100443

I've looked at the zpMobile and zpSkeleton themes, but neither seems to include support for touch gestures out of the box.

There is also a very nice recent site in the showcase (http://peterhoehsl.com/) which implements swiping for scrolling, but on close examination it seems that this uses the Galleria script to achieve this.

Am I missing some obvious solution here, or is control via touch gestures just not part of Zenphoto right now?

Sorry, if you need touch gestures you need to implement them yourself. It requires for sure extra Javascript/jquery coding and a special theme setup (for jquery mobile it might be easier).

I've just discovered the zpBootstrap theme (http://www.vincentbourganel.fr/news/zpbootstrap-a-responsive-theme-zenphoto-zenpage) by Vincent Bourganel which does seem to offer scrolling via swiping. This theme looks very nice in some ways but it lacks Exif info and doesn't seem to fit the iPhone screen properly in horizontal orientation. Also, the swipe option only seems to work for the 5 images on the home screen, not for normal albums. However, it shows what is possible.

I hate to be the party basher, but ZP really needs to consider touch & swipe as a core function. This is where users are headed. We may use PC's but many customers use tablets or smart phone. The inability to swipe through a gallery is a huge drawback.

Users of smartphones are accustomed to being able to swipe through images very quickly. When they hit a ZP gallery & lose that functionality it is a downgrade of user experience. Users will not tolerate for long & move on to image galleries that are quicker to navigate.

Offering this as a core function will put ZP in 1st class, above galleries that don't offer a fast GUI on smartphone.

Sorry, I don't agree completely. It is a theme decision and cannot be "core".

It is much more work to setup a theme to have the real swiping like this one:
http://eightmedia.github.io/hammer.js/examples/carousel.html
That real swiping is done via AJAX/Javascript loading which is an entirely different concept than normal themes.

So you will have to need to base the entire theme on JS only which is IMHO not a good way. Disable JS and nothing works anymore so you need a fallback ("progressive enhancement" is the keyword here).

It should be easiy to setup normal next page loading via swipe using stuff like this:
http://www.awwwards.com/touchswipe-a-jquery-plugin-for-touch-and-gesture-based-interaction.html
That should be possible to be done as a plugin. Maybe I give that a shot sometime when all the more important stuff is done.

Yes, I guess I mis-spoke. Accomplishing by theme or plug-in would be fine.

Ok, guys. here you go: https://github.com/acrylian/imageswipe
A simple plugin that enables left/right swiping on the single image page of (at least) standard themes). I don't have any touch screen device. But using the mouse for simulation does work as on the demos of the jquery tool.

I have a theme I am building that supports gestures

Yes, more themes please..