permissions for www acting strangely

[Steve Franks]

Few weeks ago, I installed apache22.  Just wanted to put up some
family photos.  Whenever I tried to connect, got a "apache doesn't
have permisson to acess ~/. on this system or somesuch".  The only way
to get around it appeared to be a chmod 777 on my pic folder (no luck
with 775!).  Now I restored some stuff from a backup over my photos,
and now 777 won't work either.  Is there something fundamental about
permissions I am totally missing?

Thanks,
Steve