It's a bit unclear to me if by "added the family permission to the root album" (whatever "the root" album might be) you mean you added a group family to the album and applied it also to the subalbums, or only to the one album, or added only that album as authorised to the group. Make sure the albums that shall not be visible to guests are set to private and move those albums for the group family from forbidden to authorised (or add the group to each individually or apply to subalbums of root album). Then again, if a root album is private and the group family (that would have permission to view it) is not applied then it and its subalbums can not be viewed, so that sounds right for "the root" album. I think either you had added user guest to the group family (which would explain all albums were visible even without login) or your albums' public/private settings are not right and thus also not the forbidden/authorised albums within the group, or some mix thereof.

However, the described behaviour with the "lost" user (unless you typed something into the Search field that narrows the user display) sounds like your database is screwed. If when creating 'ruth' it says it would already exist then in the database table piwigo_user an entry with that username should exist. Note the id number. In table piwigo_user_infos then should be a record with the same number in user_id. If it is not that might be the reason. In that case maybe adding a record would be possible, copying initially from user guest and adjusting the id. Whatever you change, backup before!

Also, the webadmin account usually has id 1 and guest id 2 (check it in table piwigo_user) and table piwigo_user_group has the associations of user ids to group ids. The guest user's id should not show up there.

Table piwigo_groups contains the group names and ids, table piwigo_group_access the association of group ids to authorised category ids, check that all piwigo_groups, piwigo_user_group and piwigo_group_access are aligned with what you expect.

If the database is further broken I have no good recipe to fix it, apart from restoring everything from the last known good backup and trying the upgrade again. Backup before! Maybe tools maintenance's integrity check or Repair and optimise database helps, but maybe also messes up things more. Backup before! Before changing things even further maybe compare the database dump of the good backup with a dump of the current state regarding user and category tables, maybe something catches your eye.

Hello

that's sounds like a database corruption but I hope it's not from Piwigo

About your 504 issue could I have an admin access sent to flop25 at gmail dot com please?

That's the max_execution_time value from a php.ini, check which are pulled in your webserver environment by invoking Show info under Admin -> Tools -> Maintenance (behind the PHP: ... version).

Usually database operations aren't the bottleneck but the PHP code working on a large result set is.

thanks for sharing!

We note that admin.php?page=cat_list may need some optimization for big galleries on a weak server