Donkerrood

I think these two posts above summarize quite well and in good detail how I would think the integration would be done elegantly. 
+1 (or more if I could give more )

I think these two posts above summarize quite well and in good detail how I would think the integration would be done elegantly. 
+1 (or more if I could give more )

Would be nice to close the gap.
Members use attachments for posts and Gallery for images usually not associated with written content. Why not tie them all together? Some of the best images are on the forum in topics, or in status updates, or in...
Say...
A member uploads images using attachments. If a member has Gallery, these images are stored (or viewed/mirrored) in a special "Apps" album, or even the name of the app it was uploaded to; "Status Updates" album. The image notes where it is attached with a link so the member can check the content out, like "chevy_impala77.jpg is attached to: These are my rides topic." (Notice the cross promotion of apps and content. Possibly even a blurb.) Since these are post attachments they are protected from deletion on the Gallery side, to avoid mistake deletions in posts. When a member goes to Gallery to browse a user's images, now they are all in one place, and they can browse these albums. You could also allow these images to move album to album (or be able to create sub-albums within) as long as they carried the delete protection and attachment info (link), but if you saw a bunch of "Chevy" images in your "Forums" album, you could move them to a Chevy album. Possibly even have a gallery album selector in the editor for attachments so when posting you select where the images go. So to the default app album or one you select. Album creation would not be good here but being able to select an album would be great as well. Similar to Facebook. You upload directly to the timeline with a status and image or with an image to an album, but you don't have to scroll the timeline to see a user's timeline images, you can go directly to the Timeline Photos album in Photos, where all the albums are. In FB you can also move a timeline album image to another album and the post is not disrupted. Exactly what I posted above. Would be nice!
If the disconnect is because Gallery is a paid app and not core, the solution for IPS could be, the app albums are simply storage folders created in the backend same as is done now. If a user buys Gallery those folders are simply visible in Gallery as albums, through making them Gallery albums or mapping or however they would do that, but the functionality would be within core.
But yes, would love to see integration, there's too much of a disconnect here.
Thanks!

There are many things I dislike about Vbulletin but one thing they do very elegantly is deal with this very issue.
If a user uploads images to the forum they are stored in a "forum" album (which is auto created). The album is then in the users gallery (under a media tab)
 It's fantastic integration and beautifully executed
 





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I've been debating how to respond to this paragraph for 3 weeks, since the integration / fragmentation between IP.Board and IP.Gallery is truly a perplexing problem for me.  You bring up some questions that I'd like to address, even if I can only begin to scratch the surface.
For my particular community, I genuinely don't have a good reason as to why I still use image-only forums AND still offer IP.Gallery.  I actually have duplicate content areas for TWO subjects in both IP.Board and IP.Gallery (yes, it drives me crazy), and it really just depends upon the uploader where he wants to be (which is why I'm a fan of seamless integration either direction to show media).  
Some general observations, in no particular order:
In general, the forum tends to be the main 'hang out' area with more activity, so it makes sense to offer space there first.  You just don't get the same feeling of 'activity' in IP.Gallery, so members are naturally more attracted to the forums.   Viewing gallery images is more of a solo activity. Forums are great for progressing image topics. where new updates are posted in new replies. Galleries are great for a curated showcase.    My personal difficulty with the enormity of this question - how to consume, view, and share content in a multi-app platform - is how you can change your interaction with the same content through multiple perspectives.  For example, you can interact by publishing module:
IP.Board -- with categories to publish about Content A, Content B IP.Gallery -- with categories to publish about Content A, Content B It's equally valid to interact by theme:
Content A -- with permission to publish to IP.Board, IP.Gallery Content B -- with permission to publish to IP.Board, IP.Gallery  
Ultimately though, I decided a long time ago I shouldn't force my members to choose one app or the other.  IP.Board and IP.Gallery both equally valid places to upload, since they can both still serve the fundamental purpose of being an image container.   

No, but you can upload your images manually, or using image from external url.
This is a bug and it was fixed in 1.1.4
I confirm this bug, I will fix in the next version.

I've just installed the gallery app to see how this could work out for my forums. I have a lot of topics that are 'what did you eat today' or 'show your new purchases' in which members post pictures. Asking them to first upload that to a gallery, then go back to the topic and insert it as an image is just too much hassle if you look at it from a user perspective. Of course as admins, we would want them to do that, but reality is that people are used to post image links or just add a photo from their smart phone and dump it in a topic.
I would really like to be able to curate this content (even have a setting that would allow me to download images from external links and add them to my own media database). For instance to be able to display a masonry grid with all images posted in the forum. Showing off this content is a great visual and appealing way to show off forum content, which may then again drive visitors etc.
I am not sure whether the gallery app in its current form is the way to go for me (at least, I do not see the use case), now that the forum topics are really used as the content container.
I think this is a great topic, looking forward to hear your views on gallery / image content curation and the forum software.

There's actually a disconnect among all the content in all the apps but that's a larger discussion. Each app is a silo of information and is a problem that plagues a multi-app community.
The OP brings up a powerful example of a very unique weakness in the IPS suite.  Admins often have a fractured content base because images in IP.Board have no way of relating to images in IP.Gallery. It's a major, fundamental concern that I share as well.  
The OP shared one solution: to combine image content from forums and gallery into user content.  
I'm more a fan of generating a 'virtual' album in IP.Gallery where the images are linked from the forums.  
In any case, the cross promotion of content is one area that IPS hasn't even started to address but is a very real problem on complex multi app communities.  

THIS!!! well stated. I am concerned about fractured content but especially images. Although, as aforementioned, VBulletin has solved for this issue.

I'm in the same position as @superj707 where I have forums meant to showcase iimage, and then I have Gallery.  
Since the underlying purpose is the same, the it makes sense to be able to 'push' content into the Gallery.  
There are multiple ways to implement and they're all acceptable.  In fact, the grand variety of ways to combine the two apps is what makes the integration such a fascinating and compelling feature!
- you can define uploads in the forum topic  to go to Gallery
- you can define uploads to be pushed into a virtual album that can be viewed in Gallery as well
- you can define a hybrid where you choose to upload to both Gallery and to My Attachments
- you can simply Insert Album into the forum post 
- you can upload to My Attachments per user, which lends more to a social experience tird around users
- users automatically get a Community Album by default
Etc.  I don't actually care how IPS implements the cross-over promotion (that's what we pay them for, so they can figure it out, right?) So long as they implement something. But right now we have nothing.  
Will it perhaps require expanded permissions of categories and Albums in Gallery? Perhaps.  Admins of users will need to decide if they allow forum uploads (or on a broader scale, if they allow any community image).  Will it also require expanded settings in forum topics or in forum boards? Probably.  
Theres a ton of complexity in this that I can't even begin to understand.  But its in that complexity that there's the most potential for growth and entire sets of new features.  
 

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.

I've found images are really, really important to folks and they often see them as integral to the conversation  rather than as standalone gallery items per se. It takes some forethought and extra steps to think, "well first I'll post this into to a gallery album so I can reference it and then go back to the chit-chat forum and embed the image that goes with the story I want to tell so we can talk about it."
I suspect the difference may be the subtle difference between a comment and a reply.  You can certainly have a discussion in comments, but forums are set up and people are conditioned to use them as the meeting place, while galleries tend to have more of a museum or portfolio quality.  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.
I would like to see increased visibility across image sources, although I don't personally see the need to specifically integrate attachments into the gallery (although that's certainly one way to accomplish it). I would be happy to simply see per-user image results aggregated in a "show content" view from their profile, honoring whatever permissions exist for wherever the content came from. 

Hi Lindy,
Let me just say I am always REALLY impressed with how good you are with customer service. I love that you take time to interact with us and you have a great amount of patience in doing so. Thank you
With that being said, I don't claim to have the perfect solution to the issue of fragmented content between apps. Let me just clearly set up the issue in my personal situation and go from there.
I have a site that has been run as an image board for 7 years. We have forums designated specifically for posting pictures. The majority of my forums are focused around created threads filled with pictures. Forums such as "pictures of you" etc.  In this forum a user will start a thread about themselves and add picture updates whenever they like.
Now that I've added gallery to the mix users are asking often "Where should I post images, in the thread or in the gallery?"
Furthermore suppose I think Sally is a really great user and I want to see all of the images she has added to our website I go to her profile and I can only easily find content she's posted to gallery. Any images she's posted to the forums is near impossible to find without drudging through each topic and post.
So my solution is NOT to duplicate images. My solution is that when content (images) are uploaded to the forums they are stored in a special album in gallery.
This is the facebook solution already! If on facebook I post an image to my timeline, 6 months later I can find it in my "images posted to timeline" album in my facebook photos gallery. Essentially all images uploaded to MY IPS site should be collected in the gallery where they can be reviewed by other users. An image uploaded to my site should be one piece of integrated content that can be viewed in any app (forum or gallery).  I don't want to have to hunt down images in each specific app.
Does that help?
 

I'm still finding a way to crop.

V 4.0.11 has been released:
No get emoticons anymore. Fix bug that causes error if using wrong rss url. You can download in marketplace right now

Yes

Sorry for the bump. But I think the following works. I'm currently testing it.


https://board-url/index.php?app=core&module=global&section=login&do=process POST ips_username=GoogleBot ips_password=the password you set for the bot auth_key=880ea6a14ea49e853634fbdc5015a024 rememberMe=1
As far I understand the auth_key is always 880ea6a14ea49e853634fbdc5015a024 for guests.

It would help if the instructions here identified login page, method and parameters concept.

You can already give Adsense login credentials for your forum to account for forums that can't be accessed by a guest.

4.0 will also allow you to restrict where ads show, which can be used to disable ads in non-guest forums if you prefer.

iven me waiting for this

yeah, I have the exact condition, waiting respond

You might be aware of this already, but it is a request that would be highly appreciated by myself and I think by the rest of the community as well.

On my forums, I have specific forums which are not accessible for guests and also not for the google search crawler, because I prefer this forums not to be searchable through google.

However, it would be great if we could set separate access (f.i. as a separate user group) for the AdSense crawler, because irrespective of whether you can google these private forums, I want the ads on these forums to be as relevant as possible. The login feature of the adsense crawler doesn't work with IPB, as far as I know.

Please IPS, could you include code that recognizes the AdSense crawler and assign it to a specific user group? Thanks!

You might be aware of this already, but it is a request that would be highly appreciated by myself and I think by the rest of the community as well.

On my forums, I have specific forums which are not accessible for guests and also not for the google search crawler, because I prefer this forums not to be searchable through google.

However, it would be great if we could set separate access (f.i. as a separate user group) for the AdSense crawler, because irrespective of whether you can google these private forums, I want the ads on these forums to be as relevant as possible. The login feature of the adsense crawler doesn't work with IPB, as far as I know.

Please IPS, could you include code that recognizes the AdSense crawler and assign it to a specific user group? Thanks!

On our forums We have scaled the recently added posts down to a one-line per topic list, based on this
SELECT required_info FROM topics ORDER BY last_post DESC LIMIT 0,10
and a check whether the topic is visible to the user or not.

That's it, we do not include user info, but only the time of the post and the topic title..

Displaying results by topic rather than by post would be much better - with the option to display by post if people preferred.

Can't think of any situation where for the majority of users they would need to see the same word repeated 20 times in the one thread. And so had to look at the 21st result to see the next thread.