I just installed Zenphoto 1.4.3.2, and while updating some album descriptions I've noticed that none of the newlines in the editor are being converted to line breaks. Manually inserting a seems to work fine though.

For TinyMCE as for all text editors like word: Enter = paragraph, Enter + shift = br.
Besides the behaviour can be controlled via a custom config file.

That's just it, neither Shift+Enter or Enter are resulting in line breaks or paragraphs in the album descriptions.

All standard config files are setup to create paragraphs if you hit enter. You can change that creating your own config file. Be sure your browser is supported, see the TinyMCE website.

Of course if you don't use the TinyMCE editor at all you have to use plain html to format your text.

So after doing some looking at screenshots of the editor on the site it seems like TinyMCE is not loading. Is there some sort of install process for it that I missed?

The plugin must be enabled, so check that. Otherwise look for Javascript errors.

Ok, somehow the tinyMCE files got corrupted during install. Replacing them cleared it up. Thanks for the help.