This stuff is in the docs and takes some play time. I think when you register for this forum you are informed to look in docs first.
I am a newbie too. It just takes time, both reading and play time.
I also noticed that it looks like you had Coppermine placed on your site by a service. This matters only because the easy part is over for a little while and as Mr. Muller said, for searches somthing else may have been better. This is a good product, but like all good products it takes time to learn.
1. Because you want them to have albums I suggest you activate the accounts.
If they look like they have a legit email address from some place you know that’s good.
If your site is like mine and I have a very small site, you’ll get God only knows who registering. Most of the people trying to register at my site are from China, some from Russia. I get 10 -15 a day wanting to register as users. Can you imagine if user activation on my site was automated and all these created albums on my site.
I kept records for a while of people wanting to register, some have the same emails address and use the same and/or different user names over and over for a period of time and some don’t.
The odd thing for me is that they register but my site tracker has no record of them visiting the site, odd.
2. You can let them make their own albums by clicking the correct radio button in groups section of the admin panel. It just takes play time.
3. You got to create categories then albums(well I don't know if you got to, but anyway I did it that way). Most of the work you want to do is in the categories, album and group section of in the admin mode. And in the proporties section of the of the album in admin mode.
Make up a couple of dummy users, register and test and play with it, you’ll be glad you did.
Steve J