Node Gallery effectively setting author of node == author of the file on the filesystem representing the image

Ugh... thank god for Xdebug and Eclipse, I *never* would have found this one.

First, some background: I'm using workflow with my images. Workflow enables you to present the workflow tab to users who are the "author" of the node. In my case, I was setting up the gallery and it's images as uid 1, then resetting the author on the image to allow another user to change the workflow without them having the ability to actually edit the image node itself.

Great idea, but it flat out wasn't working. No matter what I did Drupal kept on saying that the author ($node->uid) was uid1, even though the node table in the db said that the UID was 3. Here's the stack to the bug:

node_load calls node_gallery_nodeapi. When the operation is 'load' and the node in question is an image type, line 274 of node_gallery.module merges the existing node object with the array returned from node_gallery_get_image_file(). node_gallery_get_image_file consists of one line:

return db_fetch_object(dbquery("SELECT i.*, f.* FROM {node_galleries} i INNER JOIN {files} f ON i.fid = f.fid WHERE i.nid = %d", $node->nid));

And guess what? Column name collision between node and files on the column uid. So, since I imported the image file as uid 1, when that array is merged with $node, the file's uid trumps the node's uid, and my bug is biting hard.

There's two ways to fix this, but I'm still green enough with Drupal I don't know the best path to take:

1. Fix line 220 of node_gallery.inc so that it doesn't select f.*, but selects every column except uid from table f. While this approach will work, I don't know if this is the "drupal way" - if the core devs add a column to the file table, we'll not pick it up until we change this code.
2. Change the order of the merge on line 274 of node_gallery.module so that the uid on the node trumps that of the file. This is much less of a hack, but has possible repercussions as it might break something else
3. We can leave the SQL alone, but manually delete the uid key from the array before we return from node_gallery_get_image_file().

Personally, I think option 3 is the best way to go, but would love some input.

I'm just glad I found this, it's been nagging me for days!