Greetings, everyone, and welcome Gerry to our community.
🙂
Sorry for not chiming in earlier, for the past several days our 'Fuzzy Dog' has been ill culminating in him going to the local animal ER yesterday. He's home now and sleeping so I'm catching up on my inbox and some of my To Do list.
What's going on here is a matter of perspective, namely "
What is the meaning of 'media'? 🤔" Now I don't mean that in a philosophical way
😃 but really as a way to highlight that the same word has different meanings based on our own experiences. For me personally I've been
playing working with tech in various forms since my pre-teen days (which is a *long* time ago) so for me "media" means physical storage to store data. Tape, floppies, hard-drives, thumb-drives and so on... all media. For the non-IT geek world "media" refers to news organizations. Ask a doctor and "media" means something else. Ask a digital photographer, videographer, or artist about "media" and the conversation could go in the direction of images or videos or animation or, if you're old enough to remember then, the conversation could even lean into Adobe Flash creations.
Now let's spin the wheel of time forward a few decades and we come to modern software and platforms like XenForo. What XenForo calls "Media" in regards to its software is what most folks what have called a 'photo gallery' in days past. Calling it "Media" is a bit more generic way of indicating that the 'gallery' can be used for stuff besides photos if wanted; it could be used for videos, audio, embedding remote items, and, of course, also photos. With that in mind it is not unreasonable that somebody might think menu items for "Media" would be the spot to browse all of the photos uploaded to a community like
Cameraderie. Really, though, "Media" in the context of XenForo is the 'gallery' section of the site which is different from the 'forums' section of the site.
Until recently the different sections of XenForo, like the 'forums' and 'gallery', were more-or-less sandboxed from each other meaning that content added in one section was not accessible by the other sections. The XenForo "Media Gallery" actually started out as being a 3rd-party add-on by a developer who would go on to join the XenForo development team and, when they did, their add-on was brought into the fold as being an 'official' XenForo optional add-on. Here at
Cameraderie the 'gallery' add-on is installed and is available for usage but historically 99% (
heck, might even be 99.99%) of the images shared are in posts in the 'forum' section. Matt is right in that hardly anyone uses the 'gallery' section of the site. We could turn off the add-on and nobody would likely notice for a bit. Take note of this paragraph starting out with "Until recently" because things have changed a bit with XenForo with recent updates which brings us back to the the original topic of this conversation in regards to "media" and how a site like FujiX is using XenForo.
😉
One of the more recent XenForo Media Gallery updates was to allow the add-on to 'mirror' images from the forums. If wanted we could have a forum named "Pictures of Fuzzy Dogs" and is where posts and pictures would all go as normally done here at our community but I could also create a Media category named "Dogs" and configure it to 'mirror' any attachments in the forum. The end result is that any image attachments in the "Pictures of Fuzzy Dogs" forum would show up in the "Dogs" Media category also and they would look & act just as if they were uploaded directly to the Media category itself. From a user perspective if Jane Doe attached a picture in the forum then John Doe browsing the forum would see a post by Jane with the attachment and he would see a Media entry by Jane with the same picture. Unless John knew what to look for otherwise, for all intents & purposes it would seem to him that Jane uploaded the picture twice but, really, Jane only uploaded it once to the forum and the software 'mirrored' it to the Media section.
And this is where FujiX comes into play. They have the optional Media add-on installed and they have the 'mirror' option turned on for at least some of their forums. A random example is
https://www.fujix-forum.com/media/simon-says-rehearsal-dinner-candids-x100v-22-04-24-0018-jpg.151513 - Take a look in the upper-right corner of the screen and there is text
Originally posted in: Post in thread 'Bob Jarman - My Photos
which contains a link to a post,
https://www.fujix-forum.com/threads/bob-jarman-my-photos.126443/#post-1185681/. Clicking on that link takes you to the post in the forums where the image was actually uploaded to. By having the optional Media add-on installed and by configuring the add-on to 'mirror' the forums, it is what gives the appearance that by viewing 'New Media' that you're seeing all new images uploaded to the site in general.
The front page, aka the 'home' page, of both FujiX and
Cameraderie are using 'widgets' to display selected content. I am not familiar with the widgets FujiX is using but here at
Cameraderie we're using a combination of a few stock XF widgets and a few bespoke widgets with the important one being our custom "Featured Images" system. FujiX's "Featured Images" appears to be really more a "Featured Threads" system but, again, I'm not familiar with the widgets they're using.
I'm not opposed to us turning on the 'mirror' options here for the Media section but would want to explore it further before jumping into it. I have a bunch of questions that I'd want to find answers to before turning the option on. If, after reading this thread, any of our community members express interest in the topic then I'll start looking into it deeper. Taking a look at FujiX, they have all of their forums being mirrored into a single Media category. Viewing that category then shows all images uploaded to the forums. We could do the same or we could create multiple categories and be a bit more precise in regards to mapping which forums mirror to which Media categories.