Dear Piwigo team and users,

Coming from Gallery2, I truely like Piwigo for most notably speed, easy rights management and it's "feel".

There are, however, two problems preventing me from migrating to Piwigo. I hope you can help me with these issues:
1. I have a read-only photo mount. Apache is not able to write to the photo mount. This setup is for security reasons and I would like to keep this configuration. Piwigo wants to create a thumbnail and pgw_high directory in each photo folder, which fails, due to the read-only nature of the mount.
I fiddled around with teh configuration file and tried to put all thumbnails in one thumbnail directory, but no satisfactory solution was found.
Question: Is there any way to use Piwigo in the situation I just prsented? Say I have photo directory A, B and C. Would it be possible to have teh thumbnails in /www/piwigo/thumbnail/A /www/piwigo/thumbnail/B and /www/piwigo/thumbnail/C? Instead of e.g. /www/piwigo/galleries/A/thumbnail.

2. I read a lot about people wanting to add directories with non-alphanumeric characters. e.g. # and spaces. I would like that too, as I don't have to rename many, many directories, just to use a gallery like Piwigo. Symbolic linking could do some good, but maybe there are better ways.
Question: Is there a way, taking "question 1" into account, to get my photo collection into Piwigo when my directories contain spaces and hashes (#)?

Thank you for your time in advance!

Kind regards,
Ben
The Netherlands