Please see attached images (first one is in phpMyAdmin, and second how categories are displayed on site).
I'm a bit desperate now as I have no idea how to fix this characters thing. I tried whatever comes to my mind, including even hard-core adding utf-8 characters in template in order to see if it will work fine (as i was thinking that it may be template based problem) but those characters are shown just fine, as well as characters from functions.ini.php file.
I'm new here but not new to Coppermine or MySQL.
Before reading what I say next, there's something I'd like to see. If you changed the collation on the categories table to
utf8_general_ci and its character set to
UTF8, please create a new category, and then post images of what that category data looks like in phpMyAdmin and on the screen. If the data in phpMyAdmin looks fine but the screen has a bunch of "question-make-inside-diamond" characters, then what I say next will apply.
I'm astounded that, based on what is being stored in the database, the category information is being displayed properly. Coppermine must have a built-in "convert latin to UTF8" function to deal with the data it stores in the database with incorrect collations and character sets.
You have two choices. Either add a function to the bridge to "break" the username in the same way the stored CPG data is broken, or find the conversion function and comment out everything it does.
If the latter, once you comment out the function, you'll need to run a number of additional SQL statements in phpMyAdmin, of the form:
UPDATE parnat_imgcategories SET name = CONVERT(CONVERT(CONVERT(name USING latin1) USING binary) USING utf8);