I have been asked by my organization if it is possible to use Mediawiki as a way to display and collaboratively discuss images from an old local file store while maintaining the original folder structure on the image directory tree.

To that end, I have been reading the talk page of the MW manual for $wgForeignFileRepos [0] and it is clear to me that this has been attempted with some success as far back as 2011. * I know that I can turn off the hashed upload directory feature with $wgHashedUploadDirectory, but it is not clear to me what progress has been made (if any) on allowing domain admins to add files to a foreign upload folder and then running some kind of image repair maintenance script that would update the mediawiki db file table with all the images found in the upload folder and keeping the structured directories in-tact.

My question is: Does anyone have any updated insights or experience on doing this (or something similar)? Or is the talk page content from 2011 still the best source of information on using MediaWiki in this way?

Thank you. -Rich

[0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual_talk:$wgForeignFileRepos#FSRepo