Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-23932365-20141129182929/@comment-452-20141130145250

Fun fact: Clicking "Quote" after you've already written several paragraphs is a great way to lose what you've already written. Thanks Wikia!

It's pretty clear we're talking about vastly different situations, and that different subjects have different needs.

M.J. Daniels, I assumed that you were talking about images which are already in use in articles, could you please clarify your situation? Additionally, since different subjects have different needs, it might be best to just discuss this with your community.

In my situation, all images are added to related articles, and we do not maintain "separate" galleries. When maintaining separate non-article galleries, then obviously you're going to want to use categories to do so.

I'm certainly not a proponent of disorganisation: I insist on uploaded images be "used" in some way, and delete images which are uploaded and "left to rot" without an obvious purpose. In my case, "used" means "added to an article", in your case it means "added to a category", and you probably used Special:UncategorizedFiles in much the same way as I use Special:UnusedFiles

Tupka217 wrote: Properly categorizing images is a good way to clean up duplicates As I said, I do not understand how this is any easier than how I do it, please educate me.

Lady Lostris wrote:

Categories help prevent duplicates, because over time, people get more and more used to the fact that they can check just one category where all the images about their intended subject are grouped, as opposed to having to dig through hundreds and sometimes even thousands of images just to see whether or not a usable image for them is already there. It's much more appealing to turn to one category then, especially when it's a character or an episode category. I don't understand the difference between looking through all the images in Category:Bob and looking through all the images in Bob#Gallery to find duplicates.

As it currently stands, Bob#Gallery is not for "every image containing Bob", and users who want "a pic of Bob from (CertainSituation)" should be looking at CertainSituation#Gallery - which contains all images regarding CertainSituation. (CertainSituation being mission/episode/event/whatever)

Users should definitely not have to look on three pages to find an image - they should be able to go straight to the most specific page. If it's concept art about a character, then the character page is the obvious destination. If it's a screenshot of a character in a certain mission, then the mission page is the obvious destination. (As I mentioned, different wikis have different needs, and a small video game wiki is probably much easier to maintain.)
 * edit: There is a problem that when an images is added to only one article, and not all relevant articles, there are occasionally similar duplicates. But I do not see how categories could fix this, as the same problem occurs in both of these situations:
 * UserA uploads File:Bob doing stuff in MissionX.jpg and adds it to Bob#Gallery or Category:Bob
 * UserB uploads File:MissionX - Bob doing stuff.jpg and adds it to MissionX#Gallery or Category:MissionX

I agree with the point regarding using categories instead of having all the images of Bob in Bob#Gallery - this is exactly why I proposed using categories.