I have a friend who has a website with Zenphoto on it. (v1.4.2.4)

Suddenly, within the last few weeks (!) Zenphoto stopped and said it needed to run setup again.
So, I uploaded the setup files and that was cool. It presented me with a login page and I asked him for the login details. He couldn't find them. Not unexpected I thought (He is dyslexic so he has problems reading and finding things like that).
I tried to login with likely usernames and passwords to no avail. No Captcha was coming up either so that was one dead end.
So I looked up this site and followed the details to reset the password namely to delete the administrators table in the database - which I did.
Tried to set it up again and it has an error about Register Globals - must be off. Set it in PHP.ini and that should do it.
That's what I did. Then I saw a comment is has to be in every place that the scripts are running. I did that but still no success.
Here are the places I put the PHP.ini files which contain the following
register_globals = off
magic_quotes_gpc = off

Files are in:
zp-core/admin-httpupload/PHP.ini
zp-core/admin-jQuery/PHP.ini
zp-core/admin-uploadify/PHP.ini
zp-core/exif/PHP.ini
zp-core/images/PHP.ini
zp-core/utilities/PHP.ini
zp-core/zp-extensions/captcha/reCaptcha/PHP.ini
zp-core/zp-extensions/captcha/PHP.ini
zp-core/zp-extensions/federated_logon/Auth/PHP.ini
zp-core/zp-extensions/federated_logon/PHP.ini
zp-core/zp-extensions/register_user/PHP.ini
zp-core/zp-extensions/user-expiry/PHP.ini
zp-core/zp-extensions/user_groups/PHP.ini
zp-core/zp-extensions/zenpage/PHP.ini
zp-core/zp-extensions/PHP.ini
zp-core/setup/PHP.ini
zp-core/PHP.ini

I'm scratching my head and wondering what I need to do to get this working.
Can anyone help me here please ?

Regards,
chris

One php.ini file in the root directory actually should be enough (or via htaccess). If that would really be neeed you missed quite some more folders. Better ask your host for assistance about that as those should generally be off server side nowadays.

If setup requests to be run without any Zenphoto upldate this is most likely the result of some update on the server itself like PHP or MySQL versions.

Zenphoo 1.4.2.4 is from 2012 and not supported anymore. If the server for example now runs with PHP 7+ Zenphoto 1.4.2.4 will not run as it is not compatible at all.

I have strongely to recommend to update. But given you left out six years of updates that may result in some work.