here's a good idea which should satisfy both sides of the argument. Setup a sub fourm for posting images which people can post their images to. You can start a topic asking for images on any particular subject type or technique of your choice. Then what you get is a sub forum of topics with a lot of images related to each topic title. Its then very easy for anyone wanting to look at images, to just scan through the topic titles in that sub forum and view them. It would serve as a self categorising image gallery via the topic titles. You could call the sub forum "Image Sharing".

Hang on a second, there are already a couple of sub forums called "Image Sharing" which makes finding images on any particular subject matter pretty easy. So why would we need a gallery when you can just do a topic title search on those two forums or even a full content search withing those two forums which would give you the bulk of images of what you're looking for? Seems like it would be duplicating whats already there at the cost of introducing more platefulls of software.

So for the Ops benefit, all you need to do is go into advanced search, select the single content type search tab, enter a keyword phrase such as "still ife", and then lower down select the two "Image sharing" forums, hit the search button and you will be given a list of topics related to still life containing still life images. The functionality already exists. And if you subscribe to those two forums i think you will be notified as any new post in them happen so you get to see any new images posted.

OR even easier is to just list todays posts and scan down the right side of screen looking for new posts in the image sharing forums and go look at them. Not all posts in there are images but most of them seem to be. It's just a question of understanding how this particular VB forum is set up to work and then its much easier to find what you're looking for. i.e. images.