Wouldn't it be better to have a generic "tag"-based system where photos can be added to an arbitrary collection of "categories/tags".
If I have 100 categories and 1,000 users, each wanting to crate their own album within each category, we suddenly have 100,000 albums to deal with?
In my own situation, I have photos from over 1,700 zoos, each zoo would have its own category. Currently users can upload photos to any category - but in many cases we end up with dozens of almost identical photos of the same elephant in the same enclosure at the same zoo from multiple users.
My current thinking on how to deal with this (based on a concept for a custom gallery I was about to start building) was to allow users to upload photos to their own personal gallery only. Other users can browse photos within a specific user's gallery, but they are not part of the global media collection.
Users can then submit photos for "moderation" to be considered for inclusion in the main media collection (one of the 1,700 zoo categories), and only those deemed good enough will make the cut.
I'm not sure I can currently achieve this with the current XFMG album/category structure, but I'm looking for ways I can structure things.
Back on the categories+albums idea, users uploading to their own gallery will likely want to categorise the photos - although I guess they can create multiple galleries can't they?
The main problem with categorisation is that it only permits a photos to belong to a single category - where there are some situations where multiple categories make sense.
I want my users to be able to not only see photos of all animals from San Diego Zoo, but also photos of elephants in any zoo, and then photos of elephants from San Diego Zoo. This type of granularity simply isn't possible with a basic one-dimensional category structure and is much more suited to some kind of tag based system.
Just dumping my thoughts - there's no simple solution to this stuff and very much depends on use cases for each site.
