What exactly did you edit?
Well, basically what I did--and I know, I was stupid to mess around with it to begin with--was I went in to the front page of the gallery and viewed the source code. I copied that into my HTML editor, and changed the link for the contact email address that was listed. I tested it in my HTML editor, and it looked like it all worked, so I uploaded that as the index.php to the server.
But...I'm guessing because I was logged in at the time, it copied the HTML code as the page looked to an admin--hence the admin buttons, which normally don't appear to anyone but me. When I saw that, I took the old source code (prior to any changes, which I had saved) replaced what I had done (so basically, the email address link was back to the old one) and reuploaded that. So at this point, the source code is exactly as I copied it originally.
Somwhere, the code to log in is corrupted or screwed up, most likely because when I copied the code, I was logged into the gallery as the admin (I should have copied it before I logged in, I guess, but I didn't think the admin functions would show on the code for some reason.) Now, when you log in as anyone, it welcomes you...then immediately says "Bye-Bye" and logs you out. And if you click on a picture, it asks you to log in, then it'll show you the normal galleries, as long as you don't go back to the first page and try to navigate.
If that makes any sense. Basically, I need to get the page back to what it looks like to an unlogged in user, which would be:
1. You don't see the admin buttons
2.The logout link actually should say log-in
3.The links to galleries work (if you click on them now, it just takes you back to the same front page) but to actually view the thumbnails you have to log in.
Replace your index.php with a fresh one from the download package. Updating your gallery at the same time would be good idea.
Don't hate me, but I'm gonna plead complete dunce-itude here. At this point, I'm almost afraid to touch anything because I don't want to mess it up more. I don't know if someone can walk me through both of those steps, as when it comes to stuff like this, I'm a computer idiot. I'm really paranoid about messing something up--it probably is something easy, but I've had so many other problems trying to figure out all the other--non Coppermine--coding that I'm just scared I'm gonna delete the whole thing. It's a huge gallery, so I don't want to lose it or completely wreck it.