Photo galleries

Photos belong inside your community, not on a third-party host.

Every community generates photos. Event snapshots, project progress, memes, product shots, conference selfies. Until now, sharing them meant linking to Imgur or pasting a Google Photos URL. Members left your site to view them, engagement stayed on somebody else's platform, and the images disappeared when the host decided to purge.

Photo galleries on Mobieus fix this. Upload directly. Browse in-app. React, comment, and tag without leaving the community.

What shipped

Personal albums with privacy controls.

Every member can create albums from their profile. Four privacy levels: public (anyone, including guests), members (any signed-in user), friends (mutual follows only), and only me (completely private). Privacy is set per-album, not per-photo, so one album can be a public portfolio while another stays private.

Community albums.

Forum moderators can create shared albums scoped to a forum or category. Members upload into them. The album lives alongside the forum content, not buried in someone's personal profile. Good for event photo dumps, group projects, and community showcases.

Drag-and-drop upload.

Drag files onto the upload zone or click to browse. Multi-file select. JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, and HEIC for photos. MP4 and WebM for video. Up to 25 MB per photo, 200 MB per video. Thumbnails and medium-resolution variants are generated automatically.

Full-screen lightbox.

Click any photo to open a full-screen lightbox. Arrow keys, swipe gestures, or click the navigation arrows to browse. Escape to close. The lightbox uses the native HTML dialog element for proper focus trapping and accessibility.

Reactions and comments.

Six emoji reactions per photo: like, love, laugh, wow, sad, angry. Toggle on and off. Comments load via AJAX in a sidebar panel, so you can read and post without closing the lightbox. Real-time feel, server-rendered reliability.

Photo tagging.

Click anywhere on a photo to place a tag pin. Start typing a username and autocomplete finds the match. The tagged person gets a notification and can confirm or reject the tag from their pending tags page. Album owners can tag anyone; others can only self-tag.

Embed in posts.

Use the photo picker in the post composer to insert a [gallery=N] embed. The album renders inline with a thumbnail grid and metadata. Members click through to the full album without leaving the thread.

What this means for operators

Photo galleries are always on. No feature flag to enable, no configuration needed. Members see the Photos link in their user menu and can start creating albums immediately. Community albums appear in the forum photo tab once a moderator creates the first one.

Photos are stored in the tenant's upload directory. No external CDN dependency, no third-party API keys, no per-image billing. The files are yours.