1. By "stays here," where is "here"?
"Here" is in the coffee shop discussion. The original message is left, intact, where posted in the monthly thread.
2. The idea sounds good, but wouldn't "here" wind up housing an unmanageable number of pics and whatnot? How would you index it and/or find anything?
Well we do have a search index, but most folks just browse the forum. By far the most common way to find stuff is to use the "What's New" function.
However, if you go here, you'll find the list of forum categories. They provide a top tier sorting of the posts.
As for an unmanageable number pf pictures? Well, I'm of the opinion that you can't have too many photos in a place like this. However, I do realize that if you start seeing everything twice, it gets really annoying. So I'm only talking about a few of the best. For example, GarryCBQ posted a real nice shot of a grain elevator the other day. I'd put a copy in "structures and building". The idea is to make them a bit easier to find in the future.
I keep trying to get folks to post in the photo gallery as well, but it's never really taken off that much. There are 5,000 images there, but consider how active this place is? That's really not a lot. In comparison? RailroadForums has over 42,000 images.