Try Αndré's fix first... but since you are seeing 'interesting' data via phpMyAdmin, I am guessing it may not address.
These types of issues have shown themselves in unusual ways...
The last one displayed perfectly fine on one server - but when moved to a new server had the issue...
MySQL appears to try to 'fix' some of the issues - and some system settings appear to be able to influence that... so the errors that appear can seem 'inconsistent'. The view through phpMyAdmin being incorrect is the key I see to say there is a data problem. This should not happen if everything is as it should be...
To correct the data:
- Backup your CPG tables (or perform this on a test copy)
- Identify the tables and fields with data issues. These are usually contained to fields accepting user input like album title, picture caption, keywords, even filenames and some config values.
- Alter the CPG tables to be utf-8. This should be done for all CPG tables.
- Update the affected fields - converting the data from latin1 to binary to utf-8.
- If data doesn't view properly, add $CONFIG['dbcharset'] = 'utf8' to config.inc.php
SQL to convert to utf-8 (once for each table):
ALTER TABLE cpg_albums CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
SQL to 'fix' corrupted data (once for each field to be fixed):
UPDATE cpg_albums SET title= CONVERT(CAST(CONVERT(title USING latin1) AS binary) USING utf8);
Try this on one of your tables... If it works, and you want a script to do them all, let me know... I can revise what I used last time.
Let me know your results.
(EDIT: changed $dbcharset to $CONFIG['dbcharset'] to correct previous typo...)