Why not have an image gallery like in other forums?
The "image sharing" threads are now very long. It takes a long time to go page by page to view images, and i may not be interested in all the comments.
Why not have an image gallery like in other forums?
The "image sharing" threads are now very long. It takes a long time to go page by page to view images, and i may not be interested in all the comments.
Very good point.
Garrett
flickr galleries
If you view using a smart phone or tablet use Tapatalk to access the forums. That way when you open one of the image sharing threads you open one image and then can swipe left to right and view just the images and no comments.
Lot's of the images are lost. Either from dead links or forum updates.
All the big images are outside links and ephemeral.
It is true that a community gallery could co-exist with the (subject-oriented) image sharing threads. My point, however, was directed toward the issue of time consumed by scrolling through the existing image-sharing threads, compared to a conglomeration that isn't organized by subject matter.
Then, there is the issue of what format the community gallery might take. Some people, for example, find nudes to be offensive. So, if a community gallery was organized by subject matter in some manner, we would end up with essentially what the image-sharing threads already provide. Most of the "gallery" packages I've seen also allow for comments in some manner - either with the image, or within some form of sub-menu selection. Comments also add another layer of administrative activity - i.e., removing comments that the OP finds offensive (e.g. "that image sucks" or "your choice of film was stupid").
vBulletin supports "Albums" for individual members, but doesn't directly support a community gallery as such. Thus, additional software, perhaps a vBulletin plug-in if one is available, would be required to support a community gallery function. You can view individual member Albums by clicking on the member name in a post, view their profile, and then scroll down to their Albums. Albums can also be used as image repositories for attachments in discussion threads, so the use of Albums can help to reduce redundant attachment storage.
It is also important to remember that we operate on donated resources, both server space and network bandwidth. Thus, we try to be reasonably conservative on the amount of server resources (processing power and disk storage) and the amount of associated network bandwidth that we consume.
PhotoPost is a fairly good gallery plugin that plays well with vB. While there are ways to have separate galleries with different subjects, it's not as simple as starting a new thread. When you go to the gallery, you usually end up at a page that shows all the most recent additions, not by category.
It's separate software that needs updating separately from vB as well. It also introduces a different set of bugs where it doesn't play well with either the vB version or the server or something else.
It does allow the viewer to just look at all the images, however, and only click on the ones they want to see bigger. In some ways that's much easier than scrolling through several pages of comments that are sometimes hard to attribute to the right image. It's also possible to set PP to not accept comments on the images.
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