Almost in every photographic community which I have attended before landing here there was a main or general gallery where one could see all the photos posted daily. That gave the maximum visibility to each photo posted because it could be seen by everybody.

That also means that one can browse all genres of pictures and chose the ones which he/she finds appealing or interesting and eventually write a comment, or leave a “like” or a “fav”. Depending on how far back one goes the browsing usually it takes few minutes.

It is generally considered a good habit and a form of etiquette to comment other people photos each time one posts one’s own.

Even in Flickr it was like that at the beginning. Then one day they decided to change the whole thing and the main gallery disappeared… When the change was made I was absent from the site so I discovered it only much later. I asked for an explanation in the forum – there is no possibility to contact the staff there – and I have been told by senior members that the reason was that the amount of posted photos was too big to have the all of them in one single gallery. They said few millions each day. That digit is not proved, and actually someone checked the source of information and found out it was much smaller. Anyway, millions or thousands that is Flickr… Ipernity surely doesn’t have 1/10 of that traffic. Actually judging from the “explore gallery and many other group galleries, the pace is very slow. So why we can’t have one single gallery with all the photos?

If there is not a main gallery where all the posted photos go automatically that means that nobody will see your photo. I discovered that on Flickr because I wondered why nobody was commenting my photos… (:-) So if you want that your photos can be seen by other people and perhaps commented or voted you are compelled to join a group and post it again there (that is two operations instead of one). But this reduces drastically the visibility of your photo because one group may have let’s say from 50 to 400 members (and usually not all the members are active) versus the thousands which are registered in the site. Furthermore, due to the low activity and the rules to post the photo in the group, it’s much more difficult to find photos which you like. That is: you have less choice. (I hope everything I said is clear enough).

Then the solution is to join several groups... The more groups you post your photos in, the more visibility you get. Also in this way you have more chances to find the photos you like. But alas! This means that the fatigue and the time needed multiplies for the number of joined groups! Are you beginning to see the problem?

At the beginning I joined only about a dozen groups (accepting the invitations I received) and it took me a whole evening to browse them all. Then I continued joining new groups (how many are there no one knows!) along the way and now I found out it’s impossible for me to browse them all. I’m forced to be a sit-backer (for the definition of a sit-backer please see my previous article) and to comment only the photos of my – for the moment – few contacts. Isn’t this system perverse?

Now, is anyone here who is able to explain the usefulness of the groups? Which advantage do the give us? And why they banned the main gallery?