"Fatal Error" My Ass

Nothing is forever! Death is but a state of being, the opposite of life. And if something has no biological life, in cannot die. Therefore, this cannot be a fatal error for my gallery. (So says I.)

I'm in the midst of battling with my Gallery2 installation. It says: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 19456 bytes) in /home/merrick/public_html/members/gallery/lib/smarty/Smarty_Compiler.class.php on line 1618, but I say: bull-fooey! Looking at the support site, I found [this handy piece of advice]. I don't think I have access to the php.ini file, considering I don't see it anywhere. And editing the .htaccess file just didn't have the results I need to see (that is, a working gallery install). I tried editing the install/index.php file as well, but with the same lack of results.

/sigh

What happened to my dear web-standards guru, my architecture specialist, who could probably solve this in his sleep? Too bad he's not around, as I could sure use a hand right now. :P It kinda sucks when the main portion of your business' offerings return errors on every click.

Update, 6:37pm: Success! I went away from this problem for a bit, then came back and started over again, using the guide linked above. I hit the wall of internal errors, then moved to add the line of code to the .php docs. I realized that what I was missing with this before was that I only edited install/index.php and not main.php as well. Oops! Added the line of code to both docs, and have a working gallery again. Joy!