About our own Gallery feature

[David Kilpatrick]

The Gallery feature is developing well. I am going through all new submissions and rating them, adding comments. Where a picture is 'normal' I am awarding 3 stars. Too many Gallery features on websites have routine awards of five stars for almost every single shot, making the ratings system meaningless. Three stars is 'Good' and should be the average rating a picture gets. So far I have not used five stars, and I would expect one picture in a hundred to get that.

I have no mechanism to enable this yet, but my ideal use of the Member Galleries would be to have a script which calls up random four and five star rated images and displays them when anyone opens our Home Page. While the Gallery is 'integrated' with the Forum (same mySQL database and registration) it is not integrated with the main site, but I'm sure it is possible for the Gallery to serve up high-rated images.

David

[01af]

David, sorry to disagree. If you assign three stars to an average image then this will leave only two higher ratings (four and five stars) for above-average images but three possible ratings (two, one, and zero stars) for below-average ones. I feel that's a bad balance. I think there should be more room for finer discrimination above the average level than below. I'd suggest the average images should get one ('okay') and two ('good') stars. No star for clearly below-average, and three ('very good'), four ('excellent'), and five ('outstanding') stars for clearly above-average ones. I agree that five stars should be used very sparingly.

-- Olaf

[David Kilpatrick]

I can't change the Coppermine ratings system so easily. Yes, I would agree that no stars could be a rating, but I might just email the invididual involved and remove the images entirely if they were that bad. Since Coppermine, the gallery system I decided to use, defaults to three stars as 'Good' and shows this when you mouseover the three stars.

Also, while you are capable of surviving with a two-star rating for a 'good' image, a lot of photographers would feel this didn't really sound right. It looks below average because the Zero Star rating doesn't exist!

It will be hard enough to persuade many contributors that getting three stars is not criticism!

David

[paulobro]

What do I know?

From more of a decade of experience on dozens of internet photographic critique sites, in a couple of them as staff member, I can assure you as soon as the "friendship circle" is formed the rating system will become meaningless and photos from the "inner circle" will always be top rated.

Many were the different approaches attempting to avoid, manage or fix this unavoidable trend. In time they all failed. From all observations, this is an ingrained unchangeable behavior of large photographic communities on the net.

But yes, what do I know?

[01af]

David Kilpatrick wrote:
> I can't change the Coppermine ratings system so easily.

Okay---it sure makes sense to stick to the system-wide standard. I wasn't aware of it.


paulobro wrote:
> ... the rating system will become meaningless and photos
> from the "inner circle" will always be top rated.

Umm ... maybe only the moderators should be authorised to rate gallery images?

-- Olaf

[David Kilpatrick]

OK, I have reserved the rating system for administration - which at present means me. I'm trying to figure out how to allocate admin/moderator privileges which filter down to the Gallery from the Forum. Right now it's now looking very hopeful. If I had separated out the registration - separate for Gallery and Forum - I could create a new Group and upgrade chosen members to that group. Like Gary Friedman for example, he's been writing a Canon book and very busy but promises to hang around when he his through with this. But I integrated it. Nothing in the helpfiles tells me whether splitting it off will damage the existing setup.

David

[01af]

While looking at a few gallery images, I noticed that the images are very different in size due to the 600-pixel limit for the longest side. I understand there must be a limit for the maximum image size ... but just limiting the frames' longer side leads to an imbalance between the various aspect ratios.

Square or near-square images will always be much larger than long panoramic images. For example, compare dewarp's Wilgemond or Beach Scene against paulobro's Summer's Ending or Halo. The 2:1 or 3:1 ratio images look dwarfed in comparison to the square images which doesn't do them justice.

To overcome this, the size limit should be expressed in total pixels rather than long side's pixels. A useful limit would be e. g. 360,000 pixels which corresponds to the current de facto limit of 600 × 600 pixels. Another useful limit would be 240,000 pixels (600 × 400)---or 270,000 pixels (600 × 450) which would be a compromise between the two. Maybe it would be useful to additionally put an absolute limit on the long side of, say, 1,000 or 1,200 pixels so nobody would be able to foolishly submit e. g. a 30,000 × 10 pixel image.

Of course only if the Coppermine system so permits ...

-- Olaf

[David Kilpatrick]

Of course, it doesn't, and nor does the engine which powers Coppermine and all the similar web galleries. There are two image processing engines currently available on most servers, and one of these - ImageMagick - appears to be broken (downloads not working) but that is academic, as my server is equipped with the alternative rather simpler but faster processor.

At least it uses longest aspect, rather than 'width', to process. We assume that most gallery images will be normal 35mm shape. It is always possible to include, in a comment or caption, a URL for a larger version where a panorama is involved.

If anyone posts Autocord images at 600 x 600, I don't see a problem. It is a bigger format and deserves the space. But as for the Minolta 126 SLR or the Rapid format models...

David

[DenisG]

Just a word of caution with Coppermine and comments enabled. Some sites are spamming and finding these coppermine (and other) sites and leaving, sometimes obscene, spam as "messages/comments". I guess you are aware of this but maybe some other coppermine users are not.

Pity really as it was good to receive real constructive comments. On my site you would have to register to comment.

Denis.

[Carlj]

Ratings I always say "one man's meat....".

Can you rate a subject you dislike/know little about? Portraits leave me cold, wildlife shots get me cooing. Now I wouldn't mark a technically good image down just because I'm no fan of the subject matter.