Topic on Adventures in Odyssey Wiki:Town Hall2

I have spent some time lately adding to the picture galleries on the individual pages of actors. I was wondering if the <gallery> templates could ever possibly auto-add pictures of actors whenever they are linked in the Cast & Crew image template so editors don't have to manually add photos every time a new one is added on the Wiki. (Sorry if this is a bit convoluted, I am not versed in wiki terminology.)

Yes, but it's not quite that simple. We have done this type of thing before, and I'm 100% in favor of doing it. If can be a lot of work, but it is so much better for the wiki. The thing that has to be done is make sure all the images of the actor are categorized correctly. (I've been going through the album images, and there is a lot of work to do sorting all the wiki's images.) This is exactly what you did yesterday here. For the actor images we use the Template:Cast and Crew Image template. Now once we have the images categorized correctly then it is not too hard to automatically build a gallery. (I think we have a template for that already, if not I can make one easily.) I happened to be experimenting with programmatically built galleries last week.

I was looking in to this for character images and I ran into a bit of a problem. Take for example Category:Images of Matthew Parker there are 44 in there already (and Matthew is not a huge character, image it with Whit or Connie). Most of these images do not need to be featured in a gallery on the character's page. To that end, what I'm thinking is we have a parameter in the Character Image‎‎ template (Cast and Crew Image template for the actors) that designates we want this image in the character's gallery. Something like "gallery=10". (I thinking of using the number for sorting). This way we can have the entire collection of images linked, but show only the best ones. However there is no real benefit to a system like that, we already have a curated selection of images on the character pages. Then again, if we do really just want to show all a character's image on their page, then that is simple(ish) and nothing further needs to be done on the images' pages.

So the question becomes do we want all the character's images to display on their page? Or do we want only the best and most relevant images to display?

Now this issue is much less of a concern for the actors simply because we have no where near the number of pictures of them. Yet eventually we could run into the same issue where there are too many images to display all of them. I'd rather design the system for that now, then have to go back and redo everything some time in the future.