External group user sees fewer media than before

💻 Environment/Context

• Distribution
• External groups
• Rule tab
• User media access
• !=

❓ Issue/Question

• From the Home tab, when I filter by photo, only about 2000 photos appear, while our entire archive has many more.
• A user in an external group reports that far fewer media are visible than before — for example a few thousand photos when the archive holds many times that. The drop is recent and the user has not changed anything on their side.

👌 Resolution/Answer

• As first step, please check External group user does not see the media 
• If that does not resolve the issue, look at the group operator at the top of the rule group:
  • Open the external group and go to the Rules tab 
  • Check the operator dropdown at the top of the rule group 
  • If it is set to OR and the group is built entirely from exclusion rules, change it to AND 
  • Save, then ask the user to refresh the page

🥚 Cause

• Each exclusion rule states a condition the media must satisfy: "does not carry tag A", "does not carry tag B". The operator decides how many must hold. AND requires all of them, so a media item is only visible if it carries none of the excluded tags — the intended block-list. OR requires only one, so a file tagged A still passes on the strength of not being tagged B, and no tag is reliably blocked. A group built entirely of != rules therefore has to be joined with AND.
• The operator on the group's rule group was likely changed from AND to OR. The group then lost access to most of the library rather than just the media carrying the excluded tags.

🔖 Notes 

• User can't see media 
• External group doesn't see media with specific tag