I had a post up here earlier asking, Why don't pictures from my gallery show up on public entries I make in communities? When I make a public entry in a community with a photo that I'm hosting on the beta, then I can see the picture all right, but other community members report that they get a question mark or a "Forbidden" message instead of the photo. This has happened two or three times now.
I'm editing the post because I figured out the problem/issue, but due to this message being in the moderation queue, I couldn't edit it or pull it back or post a second message. What happened was, I had several photos uploaded to the Unsorted group, and I had not created any public galleries nor placed the uploaded photos in public galleries. The Unsorted group apparently defaults to Private, or at least it did for me, meaning that no one could see any of my photo posts but me. Under the current setup, it appears that creating at least one gallery is necessary to post any photos publicly because the Unsorted group defaults to Private and its settings either can't be changed or I couldn't figure out how to change them.
It would be good if we had an option to set our Unsorted group overall default to Friends or to Public rather than it always being set to Private and forcing us to move photos to galleries in order to allow people to see them. I don't generally use galleries with my current pay photo host, and I find the gray Gallery view option on LJ's setup to have more bells and whistles than I want or need. I'd really like something very easy where I can just upload a photo to Unsorted and post it, without dealing with all the organizational options.
Furthermore, it would also be good if we had some kind of indicator of a photo's status because when I post a photo on my LJ, I can generally see it fine, and I don't know that other people can't see it unless they post a comment saying "Can't see the picture". Since most people will scroll on past without saying anything if they see a broken photo, it took me some time to get enough comments to realize that the photo host was definitely having a problem because I myself could see the pictures.
