UTF-8 in PowerGallery for different languages

power gallery seems to be no exception to this: Naming your pictures with "foreign" characters simply does not work as it should.
Although the php pages used in this collection are UTF-8 encoded, something seems wrong in the databes connections or collation. See below.

Power Gallery InstallationWizard shows:

* php5.3.2 is installed (screenshot363)
* GD Image Library [2.0]
* SimpleXML is installed
* Files and directories can be created
* btw: MySQL 5.1.41 is used

First thing which seemed unusual was the collation.
Checking the database tables with phpmyadmin shows collation latin1_bin. (screenshot357)
Then, go to admin and try naming your pictures. Like on the screenshots.
giving a title like
* "mon petit chien garçon" is changed to "mon petit chien gar?on"
* "señora" is changed to "se?ora" (screenshot 368),
* "große Liebe" turns to "gro� Liebe".

Any idea how to solve this?

Have you tried changing the collation of the table? In your last screenshot there is a dropdown with different values. Try changing it to one of the utf8 values and that will probably solve your issue.

Thank you!
Your suggestion solved at least part of the problem.
I changed the collation to "utf8_bin" of "table pg1_gallery_images" (screenshot369) and corrected the description of image 9 from the picture samples to "mon petit chien garçon". This time it was saved correctly in the database. (screenshot370).

But the text in the category manage images (admin/manageimages.php) is displayed incorrect still. (screenshot372). It now shows "mon petit chien gar�on."
The page encoding shows utf-8, though.

So, no joy yet...

This is an old thread I found that might work another_lousy_php_mysql_charset_issue
They have a change that can be made to MySQL and one that can be made to PHP. I would try the PHP fix first, try setting the default_charset to utf8 and see if that fixes it. You can set that in the php.ini or by using ini_set('default_charset', 'utf8'); on the page itself (i'd put it in the global file since its on every page).

thanks for the hint. I cannot try it from here but will do so asa I am back to my studio.
best

uncommenting php.ini's
default_charset = "utf-8"

did not change anything. :-(

was complicated enough to get this done at the webhost...

The problem is not solved. I put
$result0 = mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8');
if (!$result0) {
die('invalid request: ' . mysql_error());
}
in the connection string for the mysql database but it still does not work. What part of the code is ruining the correct character transmission?

Originally Said By: Justin Nemeth

  This is an old thread I found that might work another_lousy_php_mysql_charset_issue
They have a change that can be made to MySQL and one that can be made to PHP. I would try the PHP fix first, try setting the default_charset to utf8 and see if that fixes it. You can set that in the php.ini or by using ini_set('default_charset', 'utf8'); on the page itself (i'd put it in the global file since its on every page).  

It took me some more grey hairs and some were pulled out, but I found the solution, thanks to your hint:
I put
//initial character set = utf-8
ini_set('default_charset', 'utf-8');

on top of the global.php file.
MIND THE DASH. I had to put utf-8. utf8 did not work!

Could you please advise your developers to be more consistent with the installation script, especially with the database settings. Had to manually replace all Latin1 collations with utf-8.
Now Señora Carmen is diplayed correctly

Awesome, glad you got it working and thanks for the follow up.