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Galleria: The Basics

I would LOVE to know that too. I can't release my new forum without a gallery, because our forum now has a huge gallery, and we are using it a lot for our front page articles etc.

It is very very much needed ... also by people here: http://xenforo.com/community/threads/suggestion-albums-photo-gallery.1142/

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Cant wait :) Looking forward to the release of this.

I guess i'm lucky in that i have no gallery to migrate from, however it is the one thing that i need looking forwards - have seen the PP info, and to be honest there is no way that i could justify integration of that to my users - so i'm happy to wait till the release of Galleria :)
 
I think one of the things you need to think about when designing any mod is "Does it do anything better than what is currently available around the net?". A built in gallery doesn't do this if you ask me; while yes, the administrators/mods will use the gallery to fill it with content, users wont. We had galleries in vBulletin, and I could never get my users to use them and I dont think even XenForo can change that.

They instead uploaded their pictures to flickr, photobucket, imageshack or one of the many free hosting websites out there. An image gallery ties the user into the host of the gallery, and people would rather not have their images tied to a specific forum, but to a gallery website like flickr. So honestly I find an image gallery as one of those mods that admins install because they think its "cool", but in the end, doesn't bring anything beneficial to the table.

The problem is that nobody's actually done a GOOD job with a community gallery yet. We've got almost 16,000 images in our gallery, the VAST majority of them have been put there by our members. The gallery had generated over 5,000,000 views for us, and gives us a deep resource of content that we have the legal right to use in our articles etc. Loading images on our sites does a few thing for our members:

  1. The images are searchable. Not just by category, but based on the values selected for various required fields AND the description. The image results are tied into the vBulletin search.php results. So they show newest image thumbs for "New Posts" and if you put in keywords you'll get matching thumbs in the result set as well as matching posts/threads.
  2. They are easily dropped into posts that you make in the forum.
  3. Members can comment on an image, which spawns a thread in the appropriate forum with the image/set linked to the thread and shown above the OP. The OP is sent a notification and they can reply in the thread (We also set the prefix for the thread title based on the image category/associated forum which helps a lot with SEO) .
This is the best we could do with some modifications of the best Gallery for vBulletin (Photoplog), but with better integration, images can be much more a part of the conversation in the forum. A gallery can be a VERY vital, important part of the community platform, but it needs deep integration with the rest of the system to do so. To date, almost all community gallery systems are implemented as stand alone systems with very little deep integration with the rest of the community. Same thing with Blogs. All the disparate parts of a community should be deeply integrated with each other. Image uploads should automatically go into the gallery and be VERY easily dropped into any other form of content (threads, blogs, etc) via a quick popup. They should link back to where they came from, and if you look at at them there they should show where else they are used(links).

I sooooo hope I get to be involved with any Alpha phase planning of a Gallery solution, because I've spent years working with ours and have learned a lot about what works and what gets people to use it. :)
 
I think one of the things you need to think about when designing any mod is "Does it do anything better than what is currently available around the net?". A built in gallery doesn't do this if you ask me; while yes, the administrators/mods will use the gallery to fill it with content, users wont. We had galleries in vBulletin, and I could never get my users to use them and I dont think even XenForo can change that.

Since KK is coding this gallery due to customer demand, (they've stated they have a heavily used gallery on their website now), lets hope it does get used.
 
I think Tigratrus' users contribute to his gallery.
I'm not sure what images you want 8wayrun people to contribute ?
Maybe the occasional screenshot ?

The content of your forum will be a major determinant of people contributing images or not.
 
I think one of the things you need to think about when designing any mod is "Does it do anything better than what is currently available around the net?". A built in gallery doesn't do this if you ask me; while yes, the administrators/mods will use the gallery to fill it with content, users wont. We had galleries in vBulletin, and I could never get my users to use them and I dont think even XenForo can change that.

They instead uploaded their pictures to flickr, photobucket, imageshack or one of the many free hosting websites out there. An image gallery ties the user into the host of the gallery, and people would rather not have their images tied to a specific forum, but to a gallery website like flickr. So honestly I find an image gallery as one of those mods that admins install because they think its "cool", but in the end, doesn't bring anything beneficial to the table.

My communities thrive on the photo gallery and my members upload lots of content to it (Getting close to 10 gigs in total). My galleries also do very well with adsense and will not start an XF community without one.
 
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