Coppermine is a multi-purpose fully-featured and integrated web picture gallery script written in PHP using GD or ImageMagick as image library with a MySQL backend.
It is free software (released under GNU GPL) which you can download and install on your webspace.
This live-demo that you're currently browsing is not the actual Coppermine package that you should run on your webserver/webspace. The sole purpose of this live-demo is to give you an impression how the admin backend of Coppermine looks and feels. It is only meant to be used for evaluation purposes. You mustn't run it as a production system, because it has deliberately been configured in an unsecure manner to provide a newbie-proof experience in the first place.
If you have downloaded this package in error and you are actually looking for the "real thing" (the production-ready application), go to the download section of the official Coppermine web page and download the most recent stable release there.
The actual Coppermine release is well-documented and supported. However, this live-demo is not! It comes as-is, simply as a courtesy for the community. Do not clutter the coppermine support board or any other channels by requesting support on issues that are inherent to the live-demo.
Although the main purpose of this live-demo is evaluation, advanced Coppermine users may use it as well as a testbed for hacks/mods/plugins to test them before actually applying them on their production system. Keep in mind though that the webserver-configuration of this live-demo will no doubt differ from your production-gallery.
The live-demo can be particularly helpful to create and edit a custom-theme and test-drive it before actually appyling it to your production environment.
Before doing as suggested above, make sure that you have the skills to transfer your local changes to your production environment - it would be frustrating to have your changes applied to the live-demo and not being capable to transfer them to the production server, especially since you can't ask such questions on the Coppermine support board (remember: the live-demo goes unsupported!).
This live-demo might give you the impression that running your own webserver on your desktop might be a good idea, as it appears to be working well for you. However, we don't recommend self-hosting at all. We're convinced that running a real, production-server available on the internet should only be done by professional admins who have the skills and time to maintain and monitor the webserver 24/7.
The live-demo has been created using the tool server2go, which is an app that allows you to create a portable webserver environment (using Apache, PHP, mySQL) for Windows. The software is donation-ware (everybody can use it for free, however you're asked to donate to the author). The Coppermine dev team would like to thank Timo Haberkern (the author of server2go) for providing this nice tool. It's mandatory though that you understand that the Coppermine group is not afiliated with server2go in any way - we do not provide support for it, and subsequently we don't support the live-demo.
The server2go application does not come with a service to send emails. Therefor, you can't use any of the email-related functions that are built into Coppermine. There is a warning built into the live-demo that should tell you so as well. Coppermine doesn't come with an email engine of it's own, it relies on the webserver it runs on to be configured to send emails.
Another limitation is the known issue of the browsable batch-add interface not working properly on Windows-driven servers. Therefor, you can't test-drive this feature using the live-demo. Most "real" production webservers are Linux/Unix-driven, so the limitation usually doesn't apply there.
If you already have an Apache webserver running on your desktop PC, you can't start another one. Therefor, you can't use the Live-Demo unless you end the other server first. Anyway: the Live-Demo is meant for people who don't have a webserver yet and want to test Coppermine first. It's not meant for people who already have a webserver running. Subsequently: if this known issue applies to you, then you shouldn't be running the Live-Demo.
OK, we understand that you didn't download the live-demo package just to read another page of boring instructions - just click here: Coppermine live-demo. You can go back to this page at any time by clicking the link "Live-Demo documentation" at the top of this page.
To log in as admin, use the username/password "admin"/"admin". To see what logged-in users can do, use the account "user" (password "user"). Please note that it would be silly and unsecure to name accounts this way in a real, production environment. It is only OK to do so in this testbed environment.