Until I can build a solution which works as well as what we had on the old site, a quick workaround which may keep you going in the short term (although still less than ideal) is to us the "Recent Activity" feed to identify comments made on photos. The main problem with this approach is that the list grows very quickly because it shows all activity including all posts, media uploads and even likes - so by recent it really means very very recent. You can find the recent activity list in the member tab: ... or if already viewing members: ... as I said, it's still not ideal, but it's a start. Thanks @sooty mangabey for the reminder about this - it's kind of hidden so I keep forgetting about it!
Further to this - you can also use the News Feed for updates on what specific members are posting. If you "follow" a member ... ... or ... ... their activity will show up in your activity feed, which you can find from the account menu: ... or when viewing your account page: ... as you can see, it shows a list of recent activity by those people you follow, including photo uploads, post likes, and media comments. I use this on the XenForo forums to follow the main developers and other forum owners who I know have similar sites to mine and who I know post stuff that's going to be useful to me. It's a good way of filtering out all of the noise and getting a quick overview of the important topics that I'm interested in. Note that there is also a privacy setting which goes along with this. If you don't want other people seeing a feed of your activity - or only want to allow people who you also follow to see your feed, you can change the settings in the privacy section of your account page: ... the default is "All Visitors", which makes this tab show up on your profile, even for people not logged in to the site: ... setting the "Receive your news feed" to "Members Only" hides that Recent Activity tab from your profile to guest members browsing the site without logging in, but logging in will let you see it and will also show the information in the News Feed of all members you follow. Set it to "People You Follow Only" to hide that list from logged in members and to not allow your Recent Activity to show up in someone else's News Feed unless you follow that person too. So if I set it to "People You Follow Only" and I follow zooboy28 but not TeaLovingDave, then zooboy28 will see my Recent Activity on my profile page and in his News Feed (assuming he also follows me), while TeaLovingDave won't see my Recent Activity at all. Deselect the checkbox next to "Receive your news feed" to disable your Recent Activity showing up at all. Note that this also hides your data from the Recent Activity list mentioned in the original post in this thread! I hope that all makes sense.
This works well, I think! I have 'followed' a number of people whose posts I think I will find interesting, and can now see when they have commented on photos (or done anything else, for that mater). Excellent! The only - obvious - drawback is that new or occasional posters might not be included in ones list of 'follows', and the will be missed out on. The advantage is that "noise' is, indeed, filtered out.
Another option is to go to the media page and 'sort' by comments. There are two drop-down menus in the top right corner of the page, it is the first of these. Rather than displaying the most recent photos, the page will display the pictures with the most comments. Judging from the dates I think it limits itself to the last 30 days as well. Although this obviously won't catch everything, it will stop you missing out on the 'hot' photos that are attracting a lot of attention, especially if you also try sorting for views. It also complements the Recent Activity method nicely.
