We're going to hold a meeting at 6 p.m. on Wednesday (Aug. 22) to discuss ways we can make it easier to post photos and discuss photography on this site. The meeting will be at our office at 215 S. McDowell Street. in Raleigh, in our marketing conference room. We'll have someone down at the front desk to make sure you get signed in at the guard station and get you to the meeting room. All users invited. If we need a bigger room, we can find one. If you've never been to our building, we are in downtown Raleigh about a block from City Hall, and directly across from Nash Square.
Here's a Mapquest link.
Starter ideas for photo site improvement
I intend to attend the meeting but I'd like to throw here some ideas that can be debated then, among other ideas I hope.
1 - The priority should be to fix the broken photo posting preview as soon as possible. This drove me and other people crazy until we figured out we had to post without preview. Preview should work as well for posting a photo as it does when posting a forum comment, that is we should be able to loop on preview until we are ready for posting, then posting should work!
2 - The N & O staff should perhaps explain the possible limitations of the database or the server which sometimes seem to deliver very slowly. That may lead to one of those how-to I wish to see in the FAQ, in this case how to prepare a photo for uploading and suggesting some reasonnable limits on the pixels and file size. For instance, before the switch to share.triangle, I edited my pictures for a maximum width of 1600 pixels and maximum file size around 500 Kbytes. In the new database, I noticed some huge original sizes which may unnecessarily overload storage or bandwidth. My principle was to give an original big enough for a good print, but not too big. Of course, there may still be users who are not familiar with resizing either in the camera or with software, that's another topic for the how-to.
Generally, I would understand that the News and Observer cannot and does not wish to recreate flickr.com. I believe reasonnable users only post their best shots of local interest to this gallery, I hope to remain one of them.
3 - From the old database, I miss the display of ratings and reader hits under the thumbnails and would like to see at least the reader count. I hate to open my pictures and increase my own count just to go check what it is! See how honest I am... Thinking about it, another way to solve this problem the way flickr.com does it would be not to increase the hit count to the user own pictures when the user is logged in and clicks on his or her own pictures, that would suit me well.
4 - Once a picture is open, I wish I could navigate to the next or the previous one with some buttons. I don't see them now.
5- The FAQ could also give some guidance on searching for a picture. For instance, I noticed that I could search on a tag name and get a list of pictures. Of course, results with thumbnails would be good to have... I'd like to know what else I could search on: user names, titles, body text?
6 - Another FAQ subject should be how to post a picture in a comment. I explained one way to do it in a recent forum thread based on picking the photo URL from the photo properties. Then another user said it was possible to copy a picture to the clipboard and paste to the comment editing window. From where can the photo be copied then?
I am running out of ideas this evening, I suggest all others who plan to attend the meeting, even more if they don't plan to attend, continue this thread with more ideas by Wednesday evening. Thank You!