Yeah, I guess I am confused by what you are saying. The image paths, yes, are stored in the DB, and all the images are online in the correct spot. It sounds like you are suggesting that perhaps the images are in the wrong folder or something and not showing up (or I am reading your post wrong).

The only problem is that any images that were uploaded via FTP ignore both the proportional resizing and they also cannot be resized manually with the zen_image function. They just work off of the hardcoded width and height in the admin, so if I put 100w and 0h and turn on calculate size and proportional resize it displays the image at 100w and 0h. Similarly if I am using the zen_image function, setting the width and height there is ignored as well. If I use zen_image_OLD then those width and height are used. Seems very odd to me.

I have written scripts to resize images (in other applications, not zen) and it is pretty straight forward so I am not sure why I am needing to upload the images through the admin to get it to work. It isn't like it is reading the size of the image at upload and storing the width/height in the DB to be used later (or is it?). It shouldn't matter as long as it can find/read the image which it can.

Is it perhaps a file ownership issue? This concept is fuzzy to me but I think if it is uploaded through PHP the owner is nobody but if I upload through FTP is it owned by the user that logs in to upload files and so they can't be read properly to resize? I'm reaching for solutions here but that is about the only thing that I can think of why FTP would ruin this function for me. I don't understand it enough to know if that even makes sense.