In planning the upgrade to XF2, what should we do about the Gallery? A Little Background: If I recall correctly, all those years ago when we moved from vBulletin to Xenforo, we had an active gallery section. I believe we decided to keep it but upgrading to a paid third party option. the one we use now., that option still exists. We could wait until it’s available to XF2 as an an upgrade option to XF2 will eventually exist, but it doesn’t look like it will happen soon. XenForo released an official media gallery option, which we may want to consider using instead. Purpose of This Thread: We need to decide if we want to preserve the gallery, or move forward on the XF2 upgrade without it. If we want to keep it, the best options are to purchase the official XenForo Media Gallery for $60, which will convert out existing gallery and simplify its use. Another option is to wait until our current gallery has s compatible option, but we have no indication when (may be a while). Should we scrap the Gallery add-on, or is it worth waiting, or should we raise $60 for the official gallery/media plugin? This decision is a purely community-driven decision. Whatever we decide in this thread is what we will do. Important Observations: Presently the Gallery is under-used, so it may make sense to cut costs and scrap the gallery altogether. This means losing all images in the gallery. However, part of the lack of use may be due to usergroup permission restrictions and lack of easy navigation to the gallery. (Some members can’t use it, and I bet you didn’t know it even exists since the link is hidden.) If we scrap the Gallery, all content will be deleted/lost (if this is what we decide, a notice will be made to backup your photos.) The Official Xenforo Media Gallery plugin offers enhancements that may be beneficial (simplified useage, easy navigation, other media types), but our current Gallery has more advanced features. Upgrading to the official Xenforo Gallery would probably cause a loss of some meta data, description, permissions, or URLs. Waiting on the official Gallery Add-On to be XF2 may we an exercise in futility. If made available, the cost is probably only $10 to bring out license current. Cost and Examples The cost of upgrading to the official Gallery add-on is $60. This isn’t bad, but it will in addition to our other costs (mostly custom add-ons ), so these costs will add up. A cost overview will be outlined in this thread. The official add-on, like the current, allows us to create admin-defined categories, and the options to upload photos, videos, and audio. Everyone can create galleries, albums, and choose to list them in categories. Ideally it would be used to create playlists of writings-related videos, image prompts, personal photos. I would like to see thread attachments handled in the gallery but that does not appear to be an option. See an example of the official Xenforo Media Gallery here. Our current gallery can be viewed here. A better example of our current options can be viewed here. Let me know your thoughts, and if you think this calls for a public poll.
The only thing I can say about the Gallery is that with the death (or near death) of Photobucket, our own Gallery became an internal repository for many of the images we use for things like emojies, and other graphically oriented elements that the mods and myself use for different purposes around the site. If we lose the current Gallery, we'll need to keep this in mind and switch to a different location that we can count on and is in our control.
This is the category I'm in - I don't think I've ever been aware of it, don't think I've ever looked at it, and when I went to review it so I could respond to this thread I couldn't find it. So... I don't think I'd miss it if it weren't around! Other than storing images for the mods, what's its function?
I also was never aware of its existence. Is it something that operates in the background, where its loss would impair things we do on the forum (like post photos, etc, to illustrate the points we're making on the threads?)
Good point. That shouldn't be a problem, it should be fairly easy for me to manage these images. I can even rewrite URLs to make them appear to be in the same location. Since it seems we're most likely to scape the gallery, I'll try to go ahead and slowly begin this process. This seems to be the consensus so far, which makes things easier for me. The purpose was mostly a personal image gallery (more popular 8-10 years ago). But since no one's going to miss it. Only if the images were uploaded to the gallery instead of to a thread. The attachments system is separate, so unless someone uploaded an image to the gallery and then linked it, then images and functionality shouldn't be missing. Even in the first case I could probably come up with a free solution to re-embed gallery images in posts.
I just use it once as a Newbee playing around with a new toy. Whatever is best for keeping this forum working seems good enough.
As far as how we manage our own, in-house images, it would be important to me that whatever resolution we use is something that can be accessed and flexed by current and future staff, if possible. For our own personal items, there's no reason staff members couldn't use something like a Deviantart account as a repository, but things that are integral to the forum as a whole shouldn't hide behind one person's personal account, wherever that account may be. I like to think of the forum as a kind of corporate body, a person, if you will. No feature that we rely on should become unusable or inaccessible because of the loss of an individual member. Make sense?
I agree Wrey. What image types are most prevelant? With this in mind, some type of gallery makes sense. We can always upload them to a thread or use attachments, but that can be crude and I’m not sure guests can see attachments. It’s imporant to keep the image URL simple and unchanging to prevent broken links.