I am aware that the upgrade process essentially leaves the albums directory structure and contents alone. My point was that the rogue file apparently had been in place there for a long time and I still had not noticed it even when upgrading.
I read the "Validation issue with Coppermine link" thread, which had no resolution. I also read "Gallery Overtaken! HELP!" from which I found the reference to "Yikes", which I also went through in detail. I also searched for, but did not find any procedures for reporting this kind of issue.
I am attaching the codebase.php that was found in ../albums/userpics/codebase.php. I apologize to Joe Carver earlier because I thought it was in ../albums/codebase.php, but when I had the chance later to go back and review, I saw that it was actually ../albums/userpics/codebase.php. You indicated that I should have previously attached it. Because .php is not an allowed file type for attachments, I've added an extension of .txt.
Here is the mySQL dump of the table that was added:
--
-- Table structure for table `cpg143_temp_pictures`
--
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `cpg143_temp_pictures` (
`id` bigint(20) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`item` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`value` text NOT NULL,
KEY `id` (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=7 ;
--
-- Dumping data for table `cpg143_temp_pictures`
--
INSERT INTO `cpg143_temp_pictures` (`id`, `item`, `value`) VALUES
(1, 'footer', 'PCEtLS0gcGFrb2xraWZvb3RlciAtLS0+'),
(2, 'footer', 'PCEtLS0gcGFrb2xraWZvb3RlciAtLS0+'),
(3, 'footer', 'PCEtLS1jY2QxZjc1NGVhYjIyMmQ2YmJhNDkwOTYwOWZkNWM0Ny0tLT4='),
(4, 'footer', 'PCEtLS1jY2QxZjc1NGVhYjIyMmQ2YmJhNDkwOTYwOWZkNWM0Ny0tLT4='),
(5, 'footer', 'PCEtLS1jY2QxZjc1NGVhYjIyMmQ2YmJhNDkwOTYwOWZkNWM0Ny0tLT4='),
(6, 'footer', 'PCEtLS1jY2QxZjc1NGVhYjIyMmQ2YmJhNDkwOTYwOWZkNWM0Ny0tLT4=');
-- --------------------------------------------------------
The first two items in base64 decode as <--- pakolkifooter -->. Because the string in base64, searches for "pakolkifooter" yielded no matches. The last four items decode as the hash string found in the attached codebase.php.
My galleries are at 1.4.26. I always upgrade as soon as new versions are released.