Thanks for getting back to me! I had cooked up something along these lines and ended up with the following code to show the photos on the view-album.php page:

<?php
  foreach ($homepage_categoriesRecord['included_categories:values'] as $photoQuery){
    list($photosRecords, $photosMetaData) = getRecords(array(
        'tableName'   => 'photos',
        'orderBy'     => 'photo_number DESC, newphoto DESC',
        'where'       => "photo_category = $photoQuery",
    ));

    include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/inc/inc-photo-table-loop.inc.php");
  }
?>

What is the actual field relationship between the homepage_categories table and the categories table (or what does showme actually do)? Is there are better way to build this so I'm keying photo category on discrete fields in the homepage_categories table?

When I open up the DB table view I see that the photos_categories values are all being stored in a single field. Maybe this is ok but it seems like it would make a join on this field difficult.

Thanks again! 

Currently, the site looks something like this:

Homepage (static links to viewers)
--> Individual viewer page
--> Individual viewer page
--> Individual viewer page

My DB looks something like this:

[Photo Categories]
= num
= category_name

[Photos]
= num
= photo_category (check box selection pulled in from Photo Categories table)
= photo (upload)

What I'm trying to do is create a third table of "homepage categories" that will let me setup groups of links to selected photo categories.The idea is that I'd like to give the user a way to create sections of photo categories that appear on the homepage. All of the records in this table would be pulled into a multi-record viewer on the homepage. Albums of galleries, essentially.

For this, I have the following table:

[Homepage Categories]
= num
= photo categories (check box selection pulled from Categories table)
= featured image (upload)

I'm struggling with the best way to setup the viewers and relationships. My thought is that I should have the following viewers:

- homepage multi-record to show Homepage Categories
- detail multi-record to show photos based on the categories passed through from the homepage viewer

I've tried this a bunch of ways and can't seem to get it right. The part that's really confusing me is how I can generate a query that selects all photos belonging to ONLY the categories setup in a Homepage Categories record.

I'd like the homepage to eventually look like this:

homepage category 1
- includes photo categories 1, 4, 5, 10
- link/query to a viewer that shows all photos in categories 1, 4, 5, 10

homepage category 2
- includes photo categories 2, 3, 6, 7
- link/query to a viewer that shows all photos in categories 2, 3, 6, 7

homepage category 3
- includes photo categories 8, 9, 5, 10
- link/query to a viewer that shows all photos in categories  8, 9, 5, 10

I feel like this should be doable but I'm not quite savvy enough.