Every so often the home page photo gallery (here…this site) will display something exceptionally interesting. It would be great to know the poster/owner of the photograph. I’ve used Properties to find the filename, but how can I get an email off to the owner?
For example, P6280117.jpg just displayed a few minutes ago, and I’d sure like to know how the fake mountains were done.
If this is a FAQ my apology.
Hi Kirk
This is on my list of ‘stuff to do’ with the photo gallery. View by author, view photo info, etc. Stay tuned!
This would be a very cool feature. Some metadata that would be handy:
*SUBMITTER (probably have that automatically)
POST DATE (" ")
CATEGORY (always challenging to find good categories, buy multi-valued would be great)
*If this is the ONLY thing available, then at least members could find out who submitted a photo that they have already found, or find all photos submitted by a given person. That would be a huge benefit I think.
Initial thoughts on categories include:
steam locomotives (where a single, finished or operating piece in close-up is the primary subject)
diesel locomotives (" ")
freight cars
passenger cars
people & events
gardens & layouts
architectural
Just an idea. Success here depends on folks actually doing the work to categorize, and naturally we all have sometimes dramatically different ideas on how things should be categorized.
Also, the gallery contents currently imply a focus on photos featuring stuff running outdoors, and that’s perfectly okay. In other words, it looks like the photos are all in the category “gardens and layouts”–more focused on the ‘calendar’ sort of view of things. That might make the most sense to keep that way, I suppose, for the home page auto-gallery.
The categories I mention–which, alternatively, could simply be made identical to the forum names–might be limited to a whole new function (that you can build for us in your spare time 
) called Photo Archives. More of a research tool than a ‘pretty picture’ album. Either way.
The photo gallery is a slow to navigate. Needs thumbnail pages.
Kirk: Great ideas, Ill steal some of them and add them to the “to do” list. I already have submitter, date, and description for the user-submitted ones. Categories is a good one. How about having the category as a user-defined category? Lets say we use your categories as a start, and people can “vote” on which category it belongs in. The category with the most votes wins, and it can change, since users can say “well, thats not really rolling stock, more gardening” or something…
Hrm…
Tom: How is it slow to navigate? Each page has a bunch of thumbnails on it, and you can pick the picture you want. Or should I have the thumbnails smaller, with more on each page?
Inquiring minds want to know!
I’ll have to look again.
I guess it just takes a long time to page through them 9 at a time. Longer than a brat’s attention span, at least.
I have seen the way this works with the 1:1 photo archives at http://naphotos.nerail.org … search by photographer, railroad, date, etc…
Would probably be quite a project to do ours that way.
I think, rather than get caught up in too many possible permutations, if you went with a title that got displayed with the photo, or title and submitter, and then made the archive searchable by those same things, that anyone could find a particular photo by searching for the poster, or by searching for words in the title …
For example, if I posted a photo titled “Slate Creek Shay #4 at Long Pier” you could get a hit for this photo by searching for my photos, or for Slate Creek, or for Shay, or for Pier … and you wouldn’t need a bunch of categories.
Now, if you’ve got the time … by all means … but from my own experience, the tough part is seeing the one on the homepage, and then not being able to find it in the archives if you’ve gone through several pages of thumbs and it hasn’t turned up. If there were a name or title to search for, it’d be easy to find… assuming folks didn’t title pictures of their 2’ gauge Shay rumbling up to the mill as “We don’t need no steenking Norfolk Southern Dash 9” which would cause it to turn up in all kinds of random searches. Which … well, even that wouldn’t be worth legislating, as for the most part you’d get what you were searching for.
Something to try out anyway.
Matthew (OV)
One of the things thats currently happening in various forums is the ability for individual users to “tag” an image, or a post, with a word or short phrase describing the image. “locomotive”, “station”, etc. Then those tags are part of the way anyone can search for those images.
Interesting idea, may have to implement that, since I dont have info for many of the photos.
Of course, when you see a cool picture, you can right click it, select “Properties” and copy the url. Like the swineheards:
And … at the very least … when you click the photo on the homepage, it should go to that photo in the gallery, with whatever information it has, not the first gallery page. I know occasionally I’ve clicked one to see it larger, with more information, and then realized it wasn’t in the first ten or fifteen pages and quit looking for it.
Incidentally, none of this is meant to be a complaint! It’s nice we have a gallery… and this site has grown in leaps and bounds … but if we’re looking for suggestions to continue that, I’m offering my $ .02 worth.
MB
There should be a setting for how many thumbnails per page. Tom is right. There is a lot of wasted space on the thumbnail page, and the “next” button is off the screen to boot! If it’s going to be a requirement to scroll down to go to the next page, at least fill up the wasted white space please.
Regards, Greg