i want visitors to be able to see a listing of parent/top-level albums when they're accessing a sub-album or even inside a single image page. how do i do it?

and while i'm here, is there an easy way to show recently uploaded images? i'm aware of the printLatestImages() function, but there's no way to customize the output.

1. Try the printAlbumMenu plugin: http://www.zenphoto.org/documentation/zenphoto/_plugins---print_album_menu.php.html

2. You can style printLatestImages() via CSS in many different ways even if the code is predefined! But if you need real freedom use the array that getImageStatistic() function returns to make a custom function.
   http://www.zenphoto.org/documentation/zenphoto/_plugins---image_album_statistics.php.html

kewl... i'm almost done now. one more question: how do you check whether an album has a parent album or not?

thx

sorry, problem solved... this is how i did it:

$_zp_current_album->getParent()