Photo gallery - any interest?

[tom mann]

Years ago, Railwire had a photo gallery.  This was in an era of limited bandwidth, and it was discontinued when Ed uploaded all of 4 chan into it.  I've been having a lot of PITA-type issues with Google's Picasa, and I was looking at alternatives.  I was going to set something up for myself, but I'm curious if you would be interested in your own photo album here on Railwire. The goal would be for a system that would allow you to add your photos into posts as streamlined as possible.

[wazzou]

It would really depend largely on the size of the individual's gallery for me.  I think RailImages on Trainbored only allows you like 27-36 pictures if I remember correctly.

[Philip H]

I'm on the fence.  I have both Flickr and Picassa accounts, and don't much like either.  I have a few pics on train board,but I really try to keep my photos in as few places as possible.  Frankly, if you want to do something about images, make it so I don't need a web host for my photos - and do so in a way that uniformly and automatically converts everyone's pics to a certain size and resolution.

[tom mann]

@Philip H good points.

[wcfn100]

About the only thing I would be interested in is an easier way to post photos from my phone.  If there was a way to insert a photo from my phone in one step like an attachment into a Thursday Proto thread for instance, I know I would use that.  Beyond that, I have to see it. 

I certainly like the idea of user's modeling photos all in one place that's associated with TRW, but that's not how these things seem to work out.


Jason

[peteski]

A-board hosted photos which could be used in the posts. I really liked that functionality and used it all the time. That way if the forum was up, all the photos in the posts were also available. With external hosting often if you bring up an older post, the photo links are all broken.  Like it is currently the case with Ian's BLMA billboard images.

On the A-board you could only upload them - there was no way to manage them. But that was ok by me (since I only uploaded photos which were used within posts).

[Dave Schneider]

I see Petski beat me to this....I think I'll smite him!

Anyhow, here is what I had written:
Related to this is the question of whether there is a desire to maintain a long term "archive" of posts. Occasionally I will convert a thread to a pdf to capture the info and pictures. There is a wealth of info on The Railwire, and some way to keep it around and illustrated would be good.

Best wishes, Dave

[conrail98]

I'll be the lone dissenter so far on this. While I think a Photo Gallery would be nice, from a tech management perspective, don't do it. There are enough image hosting services out there like Flickr, Picassa, Photobucket, etc., you don't need to worry about disk space or bandwidth or any of the myriad of other potentially burdensome from a cost/time perspective that comes with this. Trust me, I've gone through managing a community site where this was initially allowed and then removed due to the cost of maintaining a lot of images on it's server,

Phil

[VonRyan]

I like the idea. That way I know everyone can see my photos.
I currently use Facebook to host my photos since it makes it a million times easier on me since I take pictures with my phone 95% of the time.

[tom mann]

Phil is absolutely right.  I don't really want a gallery where people will upload millions of 3MB images - I really want a system that makes it easy to add resized images to posts (like what Jason is saying).

I'm currently playing around with uploading single images to a post. These are resized to a max of 1024px in each dimension.  If you find this functionality, feel free to play with it.  Earlier, I took a photo with my phone, created a post, and added the photo in two clicks (one to add an image, another to select the iPhone photo).

[peteski]

  If you find this functionality, feel free to play with it.  Earlier, I took a photo with my phone, created a post, and added the photo in two clicks (one to add an image, another to select the iPhone photo).

Testing
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[tom mann]

Only test it in the admin forum please!

[peteski]

Hmmm...the attachment worked but it didn't properly show up in the preview (only after it was posted).

This is similar to the A-board functionality - I like it. But the limit  of 10 is a bit low for some how-to posts which include pictures.

[tom mann]

Hmmm...the attachment worked but it didn't properly show up in the preview (only after it was posted).

This is similar to the A-board functionality - I like it. But the limit  of 10 is a bit low for some how-to posts which include pictures.

It won't show up in the preview, since the images are only uploaded when you hit "Post".

I don't remember the A-board having this?  Paul G. must have spent a fortune on hosting...

If 10 needs to be changed, fine...but I have to be careful or I'll spend 80k/year very quickly...

[Dave Schneider]

Test of inline expandable thumbnail.
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Test of inline full size.
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Thanks!
Best wishes, Dave


Edit: I like the expandable thumbnail option. I think 10 images per post is plenty. Very few posts exceed that and it could be broken down into a couple of posts in those extraordinary cases. A limit might help people pare things down a bit. Sorry to hear that this costs real money. I don't mind the other way of hosting photos elsewhere to not add to the expenses. Thoughts?

Tried to do it with a photo from my phone, but the max upload size (understandably) is 500K. Most of us shoot camera photos at higher resolution/larger size, so the settings on the phone would need to be changed to adhere to this limit. Is it possible to upload a larger file and have the forum software resize it?

Best wishes, Dave