permission problem

Hi I installed gallery from network solutions ( netsol ) package manager and immediately I noticed a problem with broken images. The problem is that after uploading the image, there is no read permission on the file.

I have read many threads on here that seem kind of related but they are very old. Some of them talk about .album.jpg naming convention issues and others talk about what should be in the .htaccess file.

I don't know anything about .htaccess other than it controls some aspects of apache. I tried copying the htaccess file from gallery into my site root but it won't let me write anything there.

Can someone tell me what my .htaccess file should look like or maybe clue me into what other things I should look at to resolve this problem. Otherwise I keep having to FTP in and reset the permissions on the /var/album and /var/thumbnails.

Thanks.