Hello,
I have a site that uses a much older zenphoto to manage their photos. What I have wanted to do for a very long time now was to actually integrate the zen photo galleries with the (database driven)content of the various sections of the site. Before all they did was add a link to the relevant gallery under zenphoto to the article data. But then I realized that I could probably somehow just take that url and use the gallery name to somehow query the zenphoto tables and get the relevant photos and already-auto-generated-thumbnails and have a mini-gallery displayed right there in the content of main sections of the site.

I started working towards this but ran into issues trying to acquire the the auto-generated-thumbnails. This was ages ago and I'm now considering installing this new zenphoto and continuing that project. But I'm hoping someone has had a similar idea already and is further along than I am (and has written much better code).

Here's an example of where I am so far.
http://www.junkanoobeat.com/simpleviewer/

I'm using a simple flash based image viewer/slideshow/gallery/thing-a-ma-jig called simpleviewer. I supply this with an xml file that tells it where to find the images and what their captions are.

JAVASCRIPT:
simpleviewer.addVariable("xmlDataPath", "xmldata.php?album=carnival-2");
/SCRIPT

The xml is generated by some php code that takes the album values and queries the zen_albums table for the folder name and then queries the zen_images table for all images in that album and generates the xml needed by the flash simpleviewer.

What I'd like to know is if anyone else has already written an intermediary/in-between/cross-over/api kind of php class that allows a site to easily utilize the image data and thumbnails created by zen-photo within their existing site instead of having to re-skin zen-photo to look like it fits in with their existing site.

At the very least I'm hoping there a class or a set of functions buried somewhere within the zenphoto code that goes about acquiring the necessary info about images and their albums and thumbnails in the "proper" way instead of my having to guess at what queries I'd need to run to get the data I think I need.

Anyone know?

And NO, the site where the example is located is not what I want to use this on.
I know that particular site is simple enough that if I where to rebuild it I should just use the zend-based CMS plug-in and be done with it.

You probably should try it this way: http://www.zenphoto.org/2008/01/hacks/#zenphoto-as-plugin
Instead of querying hte table you should better use the class methodes.

You might also look at the efferescence+ theme that also has an option to use simpleviewer.