Mike54

I would change your plans to "wait and see". 4.0.3 is a finger in the dyke, I think there will be a 4.0.4 in short order. Time will tell but 4.0.3 looks more like a 3rd installment of 4 or maybe 5 before everything that is there works reasonably well.

If you trade "up" to IPG4 then you are going to give up a lot of depth. IPG4 is not an evolution of IPG3, and this is my personal observation and opinion only, it is a separate and very different app all on its own designed to look at images in the context of forum communities in a completely different way.

If you have existing members who use IPG3 you need to consider this as they may react poorly to abandoning the devil they know for one they don't. If you felt IPG3 had limits, deficiencies and problems and expect that IPG4 will fix those and then some you may be very disappointed. I estimate you will give up more features and more control by switching to IPG4 than you will gain, especially if you are just looking for a better IPG3 and not an entirely different gallery application.

IPG4, as best I can tell, seeks to make images and video a separate traffic center within your site. Using a design similar to Flickr it tries to create a "media stream" parallel to the "topic stream" people have come to expect from forum threads and discussions. IPG4 introduces the idea that images are for sharing so when you click on your gallery tab what you will see is not a carefully crafted and curated series of albums and images but rather something which is dynamic and (this is important) member controlled. The gallery home page is to photo albums what the forum topic index page is to topics and posts. It's not even as static as the board index in that it changes based entirely on what people upload into any public album, global, personal, whatever. You have no control of this. IPG4 lacks the depth to change, customize and tailor most of its features. Many of the major business decisions are hard-coded into the software.

In my case and I suspect a lot of others as well, the gallery is a convenience to members. It lets them upload images that they can then share through the forums using normal topics and posts. They use it to add photos to their posts. My users don't see images and photos as a separate thing or a separate channel of communication, it is one in the same. The Gallery supports the Forums, it does not standalone. When I add a photo to a post they expect the photo is part of the content of the post and will display inline. They expect that comments on the topic, the text and the supporting photo(s) will occur in the topic where the photo is posted. They expect that if people want to see more images they will chick through to the album where the images resides but they don't expect people will need to click through to see the content they posted.

My members *may* post photos for their own sake but more often that not they post a photo to support the topic. If the topic is about a trip they took they will include photos of the places they visited. They almost never post a photo of the Eiffel Tower just because.

IPG does not take this approach. It has its own comment system for images (which aren't forum topics) and it provides nothing to enhance the ability for members to add photos to their topics. It seeks to setup a separate website really, one centered around images as content in itself rather than images as part of the content. It's Flickr and I'm pretty sure that was intentional. If you post a gallery link into a post you don't get a photo, you get a thumbnail wrapped in an attachment-like wrapper much as you would get by attaching a file. Images aren't part of the post content, they are separate content all on their own and merely attached to a post with a link to a separate "site" to view that content, on its own, separate from the topic it was posted in.

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As an administrator you give up the manicured album structure you used to have in IPG3 and turn over curation of your image gallery to anyone with permission to upload an image. Someone posts some boobies in one of their personal albums and presto, it's all over your gallery home page.  IPS has confirmed this is not a bug, it is designed to work that way and there is no control over it other than to hack the gallery code and even that isn't easy because it's designed to do that and pretty much only that. Selecting images in global albums or in all members' public albums occurs in the image helper function fetchImages() function which is the main function for selecting groups on images used throughout the gallery. It applies to random image widgets, recent image hooks, the gallery home page, everywhere. It's hard coded to return sets of images with specific permissions. Change that function and you change everything that calls it. If you want to select from different images (like say global albums only) you will need to write your own helper function which uses different permissions and change the code that calls fetchImages to use your custom fetcher instead. I hope that makes sense.

Short form, IPG4 is not the next IPG, it's a completely different IPG and it's very much IPG.0. Set it up and try it, and I mean really give it a solid workout and see if you and your users can live with it before making a commitment.

YMMV