Really just putting this here for my own sake, but just in case anyone else is interested.
I noticed that after converting the photo albums across to the new software that the albums lost their owners, along with comments etc..
Turns out that when you 'bridge' software (in this case Coppermine gallery and SMF forum) Coppermine defers to the SMF users tables (they share the same user tables) rather than creating their own independent tables.
So what's the problem? This means Coppermines own user tables are blank (no users in them) the script to convert Coppermine to Invision Power Suite's Gallery can't convert these users because they don't exist in the table.
Compounding the problem is the fact that when you convert from the old forum software to the new software a members unique ID changes, so a member with ID 2 before becomes 2048 or similar. I've been doing a few join statements in SQL to figure out how I can look up a specific user by ID and name and see how their ID has changed in the old system to the new, I'm hoping to use this information to update the database with the correct owners of albums etc..
Once I figure that out, I think that's the last major hurdle. Then I can upload a test version for people to experiment with and see if any issues come up before uploading and transitioning over.
This looks like something I might need.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12248413/replacing-a-sql-column-value-based-on-a-column-another-table