I voted for this feature because I think as a forum’s user volume grows, media uploads eventually requiring more storage volume will require server upgrades in turn increasing cost to run the forum. Eventually a greater volume of users may require more RAM or CPU power but I suspect storage volume will be the first thing to force an upgrade. Some way to easily review what is being uploaded would provide some assurance that storage isn’t being wasted. One image requires as much storage as a very large volume of text.
Ownership of a forum’s data is a strong incentive for running a discourse instance instead of a social media group where the data is owned, stored and shared with a global corporation. Part of the paradox though is that if a user uploads a image or video and the forum administrator a few years later deletes the image because they are running out of storage space, the user may be upset. Once an image is uploaded to a discourse forum it become part of the forum’s legacy.
This recent topic about file optimization was interesting to me because I was relatively sure Discourse down sampled / compressed very large image files, but I was reassured to learn more. Discourse has a lot of good tools to restrict upload file size limits. Some type of tool to review, batch optimize and possible delete images would be a powerful administrative tool for Discourse.