What does the gallery need?

MP Guy

Just another face in the crowd
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I would like feedback on what you think the gallery needs to be a better product. What would make you more likely to use it, upload, and share with others. What features would you like to see.

Over at www.ZeissImages.com is the latest version of the gallery running on its own. There are quite a few features on the newer version that are used regularly by the members. Would you like to see an RFF gallery just like zeissimages.com on it's own or do you like it integrated into the rff forum software. I'm all ears waiting to hear/read what you have to say.
 
An intake of members with more interest in actual photos would be a good start.
 
All I need is to recive notification of reply on comment. Don't know how complicated it is but it works on another forums with galleries.
 
If it's important to know what lens/camera was used -just let a poster state the info without resorting to a partial list or a round-about way of adding these data. (given the size of postings - I'm not sure these data are really of any value - same goes for most web images - BUT some folks like to know).
Thanks anyway for asking Jorge
 
70 year old eyes don't see little pictures so good. Can we increase the display or the image size or something?
 
The way I see it the quality of pictures in the gallery has not gone down- it's gone UP!
Most people here now don't seem to be interested. It's very frustrating.
 
Yes, notifications would be useful.

And the Search feature should include word searches in the Photo Notes field, same in the Title field.

And, still in Searches, the Original File Name search only works on complete exact filenames... can this be a string search too?

Would like to clean up the lists to make them consistent and correct, and spread the corrections throughout the existing uploads... This would improve the results of searches.

Many many uploads do not use the Show/Hide Photo Detail Editor fields. I suspect many users don't know about this feature. This needs to be made more obvious and easier to use.
 
The ZeissImages gallery is okay, but every page I go to there is an annoying add (albeit for Jorge's website) popping up from the bottom, I lasted a few pages and it just kept coming up so I left. Very annoying how it keeps coming in and out and back again every time.
 
I personally think that there needs to be a limit as to many pictures someone can upload per day.

The limit already exists. Perhaps we should set the minimum limit too - as Tony said, the lack of interest for the gallery is frustrating.
 
The way I see it the quality of pictures in the gallery has not gone down- it's gone UP!
Most people here now don't seem to be interested. It's very frustrating.


Totally agree with this Tony. The quality is high but the interest appears to be minimal.
 
On a more serious note, I think more challenges and contests would be a nice attribution. The Viv Maier contest has yielded quite a few new entries.

In the past I organised some challenges myself, where a song text would be cut up in lines and you got assigned a line to depict. That was fun to do but it took place wholly outside the gallery.
It would be nice to organise something like that again, and have it take place in the gallery, where the end result would be that you can see all lines and images in sequence, to create a pictorial view on a song text.

Would require a song text that is free of rights, my last attempt was with a Tom Waits song text and Stephen pointed out (rightfully so) that I could not reproduce any result on the forum since Waits would likely come down on it. Silly me.
 
Gallery needs new photographers with fresh ideas. I don't really know how they can be attracted to post here, but this will make it interesting again for me.

Maybe more frequent competitions with some tempting prizes?
 
Well, it took me a l-o-n-g time to get used to uploading to the Gallery. Having been on flickr for many years I suppose I got spoilt. After many stabs at uploading I got really confused by the upload criteria (I don't do numbers very well) now I use the BBCode method and I have gone on a spree. As Keith said, though this is a photography site, there doesn't seem to be much interest in 'actual' photographs! I noticed, for example, in the current contest, when the votes tally was visible, there were around 60-70 votes cast in the first few days. This is out of a membership of 60,000+
Also I have never used (I did try) the options to include lens,film used etc. I found some of my lenses not listed, so instead I use the 'notes' option and list camera,lens and film. This part, for me, is very important as we are mostly dealing with film.
As far as I am concerned, less complicated uploads should improve Gallery interest.
 
There are no user interface changes that would increase my gallery viewing. I personally am (and have been for a long time) just overwhelmed by the flow of images through my day. Museum pages, gallery pages, books, magazines, etc etc.
This does not answer the OP's question. It just shows that design changes will not (in my own case) change the outcome.
 
I'm trying to stay away from comments not related to technicalities, but... RFF isn't just gearheads forum, because we have people who posts regularly in the Gallery, but next to never in forums. Those are making RFF as photography forum most.
Would technical changes make Gallery more popular? Absolutely not.

But from my gearhead perspective could you, please, create "technical illustrations" category. With growing number of OS, browsers and outsourced programmers the compatibility issues are only increasing. It will be nice to post technical illustration on forum and to be 100% sure what it is visible and stays here as long as forum stays.
It is very frustrating to find the thread were it is explained "how to fix it", but images are gone because they were hosted at some Australian site (some of you might know what I'm talking about :) ) which is dead long time ago.
 
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