So I’m a little stuck. I’ve figured out that Gallery 2 uses Smarty. Great. I’m sure that’s wonderful, but I barely know what Smarty is. I did discover this, though:

{literal}{/literal}

escapes Smarty parsing. So if you want to have your own header with Gallery 2, you need to alter your header file so that it’s wrapped in the {literal}{/literal} tags. I haven’t tried nesting content inside the tpl. That might be interesting; but it doesn’t work. It seems I’ll have to be a little more clever to make it so I only have to have one header file. If it’s not one thing its the other.