Photo Sharing & Engagement functionality

Thanks for the suggestion. Before we dive deeper into this, a few questions to help us better understand the use case:

• Is this primarily an event-related use case? You mention sharing photos "from an event", is this specifically tied to the Events module, or would you also want this in general community posts (e.g., discussion topics, groups)?
• Who is the intended audience for these photos? Are you looking to share them with all community members, a specific group, or event attendees only?
• Who would be uploading the photos? Is this primarily a community manager/admin sharing recap photos, or would you want end users/members to be able to post photo galleries too?
• How many photos are we typically talking about per post? A handful (5–10) or larger event galleries (50–100+)?
• Is the per-image like/comment functionality critical, or is post-level engagement sufficient as a starting point?

Not necessarily tied to the event module. We have a community for our partners and occasionally we also post in a forum celebrating their years of partnership, I could see that community moderator also posting a series of pictures highlighting that partnership through the years. Additionally, I could envision a recap post from our yearly conference with multiple pictures.

• Who is the intended audience for these photos? Are you looking to share them with all community members, a specific group, or event attendees only?

Our community is heavily gated by permissions, we leverage a lot of custom roles so it would be based on where we post the images. So the audience could be any of the situations you describe in your question. 

• Who would be uploading the photos? Is this primarily a community manager/admin sharing recap photos, or would you want end users/members to be able to post photo galleries too?

The need I’ve described is for a community manager/moderator/admin. While I could envision scenarios where end users would want to as well I’d prioritize the first set of users. 

• How many photos are we typically talking about per post? A handful (5–10) or larger event galleries (50–100+)?

I think the former, maybe up to 20 photos. Anything in the range of 50-100 I think would be diluting what you’d want to showcase. 

- Is the per-image like/comment functionality critical, or is post-level engagement sufficient as a starting point?

The per-image like/comment is important but I wouldn’t say critical as a starting point - I could see tracking that engagement as being a tricky piece to engineering this functionality. 


Would be interested to see others thoughts who upvoted this idea!

​@Sudhanshu - I’m happy to provide more feedback as well. 

• For us, this wouldn’t be for events. But rather, a lot of our community engagement used to come through sharing photos. In Gainsight, this is clunky and limited. The ability for folks to share photos (and equally easily see images other people posts) would be a huge engagement driver. 

• Who is the intended audience for these photos? Are you looking to share them with all community members, a specific group, or event attendees only?

All community members!

• Who would be uploading the photos? Is this primarily a community manager/admin sharing recap photos, or would you want end users/members to be able to post photo galleries too?

Both! We share photos and encourage community members to upload photos as well. For instance, we’re waiting for better functionality from Gainsight before launching our “Pets” channel. While we know this will do REALLY well, no one wants to click into each response to see the photo. The ability to see the photo without opening the response has to be there. 

• How many photos are we typically talking about per post? A handful (5–10) or larger event galleries (50–100+)?

For us this would be likely 1 - 2 photos per response. Nothing crazy. 

- Is the per-image like/comment functionality critical, or is post-level engagement sufficient as a starting point?

Not critical for us, but it would be a lovely addition that would help engagement. 

In short, people don’t want to use communities the way they did in the past. They need to have more functionality when it comes to photos (to start) and eventually videos. Text-heavy forums are dying, and we need to offer more to our community members if we expect to maintain (or ever increase) engagement. Photos are one of the easiest ways to do this. We’d greatly appreciate any enhancements to posting/viewing photos within the tool. 

Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions. 

I agree with all of the comments so far. I upvoted this because I think it would be good to simply have a means of displaying multiple photos in a way that’s convenient for users to browse beyond the current method that really is only meant for single images at a time. 

There are a number of use cases for us, including event wrap-ups (images of the event itself), event landing pages (speaker bios), guides or walkthroughs (product screenshots), etc. I see this idea as just offering more options for how to display images—a carousel, a thumbnail grid where images pop open larger on click, multi-image containers of various sizes (1 x 3, etc.). This could include the ability to do more with caption text formatting or other ways of adding supporting text to images. 

I hope that helps.