Image board owners face a major struggle between forums for images and Gallery. They are disconnected.

For those of us that run image boards IP4.x has some issues I've been thinking over. There is some disconnected logic regarding images. I have boards for posting images but I also want to use gallery. I am going to end up with fragmented content all over the place and no easy way to find content from a specific user.

1. It's difficult to view IMAGE attachments per user in profile. You can see "posts" or "topics" but not attachments. 
2. If we have boards that are set up for posting images AND Gallery installed there is a logical disconnect.  We end up with some images in the forums and other images in the gallery but no way at all to tie the two together.  (see screen shot, this user has posted MANY images to the forums but under images there isn't anything posted.)

 

Recommendation: An option to allow images posted in the forums to automatically be considered part of gallery and be view-able in both places. Forms feeding gallery would avoid any fragmentation or disconnects. Also a place in profile to view "attachments"

 

Note: VB5 actually works by integrating user "image" content in forums or gallery into one single thing. It's one of the few things I really like about VB5. No more fragmentation or struggle between images posted in forums verses gallery

Edited December 29, 20159 yr by superj707

 

That is very helpful - thank you! If I'm understanding correctly, you want to treat media as media - whether it's an attachment or a direct Gallery upload. I do agree that Gallery images should be more accessible in other apps. I have some concern about going the other way from forum posts to Gallery as there's some inherent issues with permissions and end-user expectations on differing sites. It sounds like your site is one of the open type in that if you're a member, you have generally open access to all aspects of the site. If you take another site like a mental health/support, or even internal corporate communities which are quite popular with us it becomes a bit stickier. Many of those sites are divided and privacy is paramount. I can see someone thinking they're posting an attachment to a post in a private forum that's really going to the public gallery being rather devastated. I wouldn't expect it to be an impossible task, but definitely not one to be taken lightly which is why I think it's important that we understand the problem we're trying to solve for you.

Certainly we can do a better job with cross-app integration such as allowing the ability for someone to shoot an image to the Gallery (if they choose to do so) from a topic, comment, etc. I'm mostly concerned why you'd have image only forums instead of using the Gallery. I know you're not the only one who does so; I'm not singling you out, just trying to understand the reasoning. Is it simply because that's what your members are used to or are there things we could improve within Gallery to make that better fit what you're going for? 

Thanks again for the insight. 

To answer your question my specific situation goes back to the old yahoo groups before there even was any real "forum" software. You see, we've had our community evolve through 4 different versions now going back to 1999. First it was phpbb to replace yahoo groups. Well, we setup picture forums as there was no Gallery as part of that package. We converted to SMF (7 years ago)  which had a gallery via MOD but it wasn't as solid as we liked and our community was already locked into forums as a way of life. 

Now that we have IPS which comes with a really fantastic gallery, I talked it over with my mods and we are really torn up about the right approach. We know our users will still want to use the forums but we think the gallery has a lot of potential. We like picture forums because posts with pictures foster a threaded conversation about the respective pictures. This we like. However, the gallery has a lot of added functionality. As it is now our forums are centered around pictures but we want to use gallery and can't figure out how to smoothly marry the two. We want to easily find all the image content someone has posted to the website without having to search for fragmented content in two different apps.

  Quote

In the gallery people tend to interact with the image and the poster, while in the forum people interact with everyone else in addition to the image and the poster.

THIS!!

 

and now this happened. 

two users created different albums for the same thing. At least in the forums all related content could be merged into the same thread. In gallery I have 2 separate albums for the same stuff happening.

 

Problem is that this isn't even something I want! I would rather a category than an album. Albums are personal, categories are generic. I wouldn't want my album combined to someone elses.

 

By the way, can't a user set the permissions in its gallery itself?

Not really.

1. Can create private albums?
Private albums are albums that only the creator can view  

2. Can create restricted access albums?
Restricted access albums are albums that only the creator and designated users can view
(This is only by member name, not group or Followers. I'm not sure why Followers isn't an option here.)

Neither of those would really work. If an image is in a private album, one might assume it should not show in the content as well. Same with limited.

It would have to adhere to forum/app permissions which I think would get messy. Permissions can change for forums, so have the system move images or change album permissions?

I think the only way is let the user select if they want it in Gallery, this is a verbal permission at the time. You could have it enabled by default to be in Gallery so most users did this, and deselect to not have it in the Gallery. But there are reasons why one may not want it there, and I think a user selection would work great. And they could remove it later as well.

Edited January 25, 20169 yr by chilihead