Everyone that has been around awhile knows what is going on. Here is what happened. I started the gallery not knowing so many people needed to upload images, so I didnt pay much attention in the beginning to what everyone was uploading. This became a problem down the road. People uploaded photoshop stuff, game screenshots, and in one case over 95 photos of the same model, lol. Its ok though, I am starting it fresh. The galleries that got the axe were armor, aircraft, working, and upload. Here is what this means to you!
Reupload your photos. Go to http://rongeorge.com/modules/Gallery/upload and using the new logon, newfsm and models as the password, upload your photos. Here are things to bear in mind.
Username: newfsm Password: models
Max of 4 pictures of the same model. Exceptions can be made, but the pictures need to be VERY high quality (not size). As in studio quality. Dioramas can have up to 6 pictures because of the complexity.
Dont worry about resizing, the program will do it for you.
The Upload album is the ‘holding pen’ for the images. After they enter that album, someone will look at them, make sure they are the right size and subject and then move them to an appropriate gallery. This eliminates the hours I have spent finding reference photos all over the site and having to move them. I will be adding things to this as I think of them, but right now… this should work for the long term.
Another Note, very important!
CAPTION your pictures! Please put your name on them, or atleast the model name… ship name or something. Then you can put comments about it to describe it to your peers. A photo captioned “dsc_017.jpg” and that is it - is NOT helpful at all.
Describe your pictures! Please put your name on them, or atleast the model name… ship name or something. Then you can put comments about it to describe it to your peers. A photo named “dsc_017.jpg” and that is it is NOT helpful at all.
There were a lot of duplicates or pictures with very subtle differences. It’s great we have very enthusiastic modelers, but things start adding up. The reference photos were great though (the real stuff).
Photo names are very helpful. Not everyone knows what the picture is supposed to be. [:I]
Ron, some people aren’t all that familiar with photo editing, resizing images, etc. What do you think about a temporary photo album where people could upload images and volunteers could resize and save the images into something more manageable. I don’t remember if the gallery application had the ability to do that or not. I wouldn’t mind doing a bunch here and there.
After you have your completed photo under 100kb, upload it into the ‘upload here’ folder. Then someone will check it out and move it.
If you absolutely are completely lost on how to resize, do this. When you go to name your photo, rename it with RESIZE ME as the very first words of the caption. As an example:
RESIZE ME RonUSMC’s M1A1 by Trumpeter
If it is over 100kb, then someone can see that easily and take care of it for you.
If the actual subject of the photo takes up 1/4 of the photo, crop the image before resizing it. It’s not only reduce the file size, but keeps what’s important.
If you need help with that too…When you go to name your photo, rename it with CROP ME as the very first words of the caption. As an example:
I had to totally delete them. It was very sad, because there were so many great models displayed. There were so many problems with the gallery though. It was timing out like crazy.
Im sure the people who uploaded the images still have copies of them though, and can reupload them. This time you and I can do a quality assurance on it to ensure an incredible gallery.
If I would have known that we would be at 3000 images in 4 months, I would have taken more precautions. I just did not imagine the size and scale of what was needed or what we were undertaking.
I blame myself for not setting down any rules or being whimsical about it and that resulted in the destruction of the galleries.
This time… we will be new and improved though! You need to upload some of your models to get us started, Im going to upload a few of mine right now. Remember to caption them properly.
I don’t think anyone could have imagined the size and scale of the Gallery. It was definitely amazing seeing the number of excellent photos there were.
A folder for each group build is a great idea!
I know you said not to create too many subfolders, especially one for every group of folders. I am wondering if subfolders would be useful for some of the categories. What do you think about a folder for time periods? For example: Armor might have WWI & pre-WWII, WWII (1939-1945), 1946-1960, 1961-1980, 1981-PRESENT? I’m not sure how exactly to divide up the Post WWII period. I hate to come off as being “America-centric” and only say Korea, Vietnam, Somalia and Iraq I & II (no offense, just trying to be brief in listing conflicts). Whereas you had a lot of other wars fought throughout the globe. So a period of years would probably be best for the header, whereas in the description a list of conflicts can always be included. For WWII because of it’s popularity, we could go one level deeper by either nationality, fronts, or ?? and at the same level include one for dioramas and misc. The same could be done for Aircraft and ships.
Why dont you do this. Go ahead and create the sub-albums under Armor and Aircraft that you want, then we can talk about them later today. Remember to rename the album from inside to rename the actual folder name that the new album will use. I was thinking…
Pre-WW2
WW2 Axis
WW2 Allies
Modern US
Modern Other
and the same categories for Aircraft? What do you think?.. if you want to get more detailed, go ahead. We can always delete the albums later if you decide not to. I think the problem might have been the size of the albums. Right now the list times out at the reference images list. I put that at the end. Im also sending a CS ticket to my server to see if they can increase the processing time of php on my site.
Dave may not build models [}:)] [;)] but he does a pretty bang up job on the forum so imagine that between the 2 of y’all it’ll be good to go in no time.
Ron, thanks again for the trouble you’ve gone to to set this server up for us.
Dave, you’re alright too, I don’t care Robert says about you. [;)] [:D]
Thanks guys, the plan you have there sounds pretty good.
That looks good too. We can go with it and see how things develop. I was hoping to get feedback from others for aircraft and ships as to what would make sense. [:I]
I’ll try working on it some more tonight.
Is it due to the number of images in an album or the number of albums/categories? Is the timeout on the main (top level) page where it goes through everything?
Another thing that might help is to check on caching for the images. I have to admit I’m not familiar with how to do it on Apache servers, but like for us, I can select a folder and set the cache for all the objects in it anywhere from a couple of seconds to weeks.
What about somthing temporary? For someone that wants to post a picture on the forum but doesn’t want it taking up space on your web site. Maybe you could do somthing like you did with the RESIZE ME or CROP ME but just put TEMP as the first words in the caption.