on our website, www.jonahhouse.org, we use zenphoto, and thank you for building it.
Is there a way where the google search engines will see the picture descriptions or the tag words? Other parts of our website show up on google. Is this an impossible request?

Generally search engines should see them, but that of course depends on how your theme is setup, how it is integrated in your site in general, how the robots.txt file is setup etc. etc. Since you have an extra domain you might want to tell that Google directly to index. Also you might want to check the google guideline on your domain type (www and a subdomain might confuse but I am not sure). Also you might want to try to put the tags list (printAllTagsAs() see the documentation) on the gallery home page.

You might also want to use a site map. There are two tools on our extensions page if I remember correctly. But these are third party so I don't know them in detail.

Thanks, acrylian, for answering. The webhost is dream host, and people like me who don't know much are given the choice of various themes to use, and one, I notice, is one that you wrote..
Zenpage-Default
Malte Müller (acrylian)
Version 1.0.1.1, 02/19/2009

at the moment I'm using
Default
Joen Asmussen and Levi Buzolic
Version 1.5, 10/20/2007

would the search engine crawlers be more likely to find our captions and tag words if I use your theme?

you can tell, I really don't know much. thanks

The zenpage-default theme generally is build following the W3 html webstandards and should be search engine friendly. Generally it's HTML structure is not that different from the default theme. Probably some SEO experts will find places to optimized further. If and what google etc find depends of course on the content you have.

Thanks, I changed to zenpage default that you built thinking it would be easier for search engines, and find that I really like it. But, there is no way to navigate back from the zenphoto pages to the website home page, and I get this message when I got to options then to theme:

Zenphoto Error
MySQL Query ( SELECT titlelink FROM zp_935949975249486_zenpage_pages WHERE show != 1 ORDER by sort_order ) failed. Error: Table 'photo_jonahhouse_org.zp_935949975249486_zenpage_pages' doesn't exist

The rest of the pages look good, I like the archives, and so on..., but folks need to be able to get back to the jonahhouse.org home page.

any ideas, thanks

You should be using the 1.2.6 RC1 release. There is a problem with the zenpage-default theme prior to that in that it required the Zenpage plugin to be enabled. If you choose to enable the Zenpage plugin on your current (not mentioned by the way) version you will need to run the setup program after enabling the plugin.