I have an album that contains both subalbums and images. I am using the 'combined' option to show both at the same time, but it only transitions after displaying all the sub-albums first.

What I am trying to make happen is to have the album show 8 subalbums and 8 images, then if you go to the next page, it would show the next 8 subalbums and the next 8 images.

I am also currently running into a problem where the page which transitions from sub-albums to images only displays 3 images, no matter what settings or options I alter. The next page (which is all images) displays the correct number of images.

Pagination first exhausts subalbums, then images. Anything else you will have to program yourself, including processing the links so that the pagination comes out correctly. Not an easy task IMHO.

Hrm, I was afraid that might be the case.

Any ideas as to why only 3 images are displayed after the transition from sub-album to images?

I found a workaround by forcing next_image to show a static number of images after the transition (using next_image(false,4,NULL)), but I have no idea why it would always show 3, no matter what.

Zenphoto computes how many "slots" are left after the album thumbs and that is how many images are displayed on the first page. So check your theme options and see if they are setup correctly to go with the HTML formatting.