So this is kind of strange but I have repeated the sequence on a number of clients and it is reproducible.

There are 4 galleries and each has a number of pictures in them. A fresh browser will only see a link to one of the galleries and when clicked on there are no pictures displayed. If you login to the admin panel then the site works fine. It has to do with the zenphoto_auth cookie. If I remove that cookie then the site fails but once you login to the admin and set the cookie the site works fine.

Anyone have an explanation or better a correction?

Solved! Turns out the admin never published the galleries. Who knew! Move along now, nothing to see here.

We should have some indication for the admins that the gallery/image is not published, like a gray outline or something. Thanks for letting us know about your confusion, and glad you got it figured out!

Yes, we talked about doing this but never got around to it. Same thing for password protected albums.