Copy permissions setting from one usergroup to another

[germish]

or duplicate and rename usergroup.
I operate a highly complex structure to control access to our family photo album for friends and family.
This involves plenty of usergroups in particular because they differ only slightly in their permission setting
This album has now well over 100 categories and about 30 usergroups.
This gives me a huge amount of permission setting to change when I create a new usergroup and also when I create a new category I have to change all settings for private permission to it's appropriate value.

This is very time consuming and can cause errors.

I had a look if this can be copy and pasted from an SQL table but the info is spread over several tables so it's almost just as daunting.

Anyone got an idea please as this is an ongoing issue and will not change as long as I use 4images or a camera.

[npwright]

I have the same senario with the same question. I have attempted to work on a MOD myself b adding a permissions button to the edit category page. This has been designed to work like the permissions of the user groups, where it will list all the groups down the Y axis and the permission options on the X axis. That way everytime you add a new category, you can edit the permissions of the category and tick options (ie. view category | view image ...) for each group.

Category (name)

__group___|__view cat__|__view image__|...
  group 1    |       yes       |         no          |...
  group 2    |       no        |         no          |...
  group 3    |       yes       |         yes         |...
This will alllow
group 1 to see the category and thumbs, but not the larger image
group 2 no see anythiny of the new group
group 3 will be able to see the category and the larger image.
as so on and so forth for each group and permission option.

If anyone has already done this or are wanting to help out with this, please reply and let me know

Thanks