I'm a mac guy, looking for an easy way to transfer files from iPhoto to my zenphoto site. A nice built in feature with iPhoto is its simple export function, which used with a remotely mounted server makes transfers from within iPhoto (via Finder) easy. A nice zenphoto feature is that if you create a new folder, this becomes an album, making it very easy to add albums in this way. You just first mount the server in Finder (or however), then in iPhoto select the photos you want to transfer, and navigate to the server using standard OSX.
When copying files to remote servers, Finder creates a .DS_Store file with the Finder settings. Using iPhoto 6 (somewhat dated), iPhoto's export also creates a hidden file named ._IMG where IMG is the actual image file, e.g., IMG.jpg, for each image file transfered. The content of this hidden file appears harmless, but zenphoto attempts to display the file, maybe because it has a valid extension? In contrast, the .DS_Store file is not a problem, probably because is has no useful extension?
I also have a copy of iPhoto 8 that just came with a new laptop, and it looks like the hidden file is not created in this later version of iPhoto. This makes the above method all that much better, since you don't have to go back and delete the useless hidden files.
I'm posting this, because I wonder about the policy for displaying hidden files. My guess is that a .anything file should not be displayed, whereas zenphoto attempts to do so (in this case only going so far as a hyperlink to the hidden file name). If you just put a valid photo file in an album, with a .name, it gets displayed just fine. I'm not at all very savy in these matters, but I suspect this could be used as a security hole?