so the idea i want to accomplish is a Header image( album thumbnail) and a set of image thumbnails under each album header image.

in the end i want to so some javascript to hide the thumbnails and have the user click on the header image/album title to expand the thumbnails. possible?

i tried to pull the loop which calls the thumbnails from the album.php but it was generating errors... but i know its the loop i will need....but what else do i have to do?

Of course it is possible. Have you looked into the zenphoto documentation? You may not be able to use the Template Functions for this as they assume correct values for the current album and currrent image which will probably not be set in your case.

But you can use the root implementations based on zenphoto objects. For instance, if you are in the next_album() loop on your theme's index.php page, $_zp_current_album will be set to the album the loop is examining.

$images = $_zp_current_album->getImages() will return an array of image file names. You can then create an image object for each of these in a loop: foreach ($images as $imagefilename) {$image = new Image($_zp_current_album, $imagefilename); .... }

with the image you can get its url, etc. to display on your page.