To have gallery Albums or not

[ibaker]

I have done a migration from XF over to IPS and the have kept the XF ability for users to have Albums but I am questioning the value of allowing albums or just have a gallery of images without albums as there seems to be albums that have images across many different categories which makes it hard for users to see all images pertinent to a type of category.

What do you think...is it better for categories to contain all images specific to that category and not have albums or have many different category images in a single user album?

Thanks for your comments

Incidentally, my site is on aviation and for example I have say a category for small ultralight aircraft and a category for Boeing 747s...a user album can have both but if a user is only interested in large aircraft they go to the Boeing 747 category and miss out seeing the images in an album...unless I am wrong!

[Joel R]

And just to make the decision even harder, you can have albums where you can allow all users to upload 🙂 

[bfarber]

To me, this decision comes down to the intention you are trying to put forth with the site. That is, do you want the gallery to be user-driven, or theme-driven? For many sites, you would find the best organization comes from creating a specific set of categories and requiring users to submit to a pre-defined category.  In contrast, some sites are better served by defining looser categories (say, "Christmas") and then letting users create their own albums within the few category options you've supplied ("bfarber's 2018 Christmas"). Really, there's no right or wrong answer here.