A request has been made for a gallery on the new website.
I have done some experimental poking and found, that of galleries that work in a way that we want - so site users can upload pictures into albums by far and away the best is not free. It is cunningly well within the price bracket that I am prepared to pay as "my time to implement/find a comparable replacement is worth more than this" so I don't actually mind buying it if it is going to get used.
Back when i was last doing this it was a no brainer, because if you wanted a gallery you had to host it, but these days we have failbook, flickr, picassa and probably a dozen others that I haven't heard of.
So my question:
Does the society want its own gallery and will people upload pictures to it, or would we prefer to do something like a links page to peoples flickr albums?
Discuss:
I would *love* a gallery that could be directly uploaded to by anyone, if people used it. It would be wonderful to have the photos in one place, and if I ever fix my camera and take TT photos I would use it. --Locksmith
I think that a huge gallery like that is good and managed to some extent on the wiki, but for the tt-website gallery we may want to aim for a couple of pages' selection of awesome photos that are a good advert for the society and demonstrate a range of common or cinematic scenarios, preferably not used to illustrate phys-reps or feature on any other page. --Chevron
I totally agree with Chevron here - I think we want a gallery on the website which showcases a good range of OC players and the highest quality costumes/physrepping, to show off the society and let people get a feel for what costume standards to aim for, and people's own 80-photo long linear records should be posted to the wiki so that people already in the society/photos can find them easily but the frontpage is a lot more controlled/groomed than that and stuff doesn't get swamped out by the latest epic upload. An example of the sort of photos I think should be in a gallery are in my draft new website on: http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jcc46/CUTT/Gallery.html (though ideally there would be a lot more and with more different people in them, including for example women wearing both corsets and heavy clank). --Zebbie
I would want to stay away from the photo sharing sites as they tend to force signups and force you to leave the page. --Andy
Hmm, the way I see it the society webpage should be fairly static, edited occasionally by an admin to correct errors or bring things up to date, in line with general consensus of the refteam / exec / society as a whole. Dynamic user-submitted content should live elsewhere, like the wiki or sites linked to from there. I think the current system for our images directory on the wiki is just about sufficient, but could be better, as a completely separate point from the new website or paid hosting. --Chevron
I would shy away from user editable content on our main site, although if you need an account then it's not open to abuse I guess. I do think we'd benefit more from a small gallery of very high quality images than we would from a larger gallery that people uploaded loads of pictures to. I think that for our professional public facing site, we only need about 20 images to give the right impression. We have the wiki for linking to flikr photo galleries when we want to share millions of pictures. --Ahdok
I think that making it easy for whoever's administering the website this year to update the gallery (while also making browsing the gallery a pleasant experience) would be nifty. I think that the wiki, with only a slight extension to etiquette (involving plain statements that you're okay with your pictures being used on the website and in printed promotional material), is a perfectly adequate place for people to post links to their fine flickr albums of the linear. I think that extending the gallery with nifty pictures is great, and that the last two points make this likely. I'm not convinced that paying for 4chan's ability to fill our gallery with irrelevant and objectionable content (for all public-access systems appear to reduce to this case) is worthwhile. --NT
I would like to make it clear that when I say "users" I mean "people who have asked the webadmin for accounts" (which for a basic upload images account would be any society member). However I want something where any of these such users can upload images through a nice front end system rather than having to go through the sites administration backend, which is 1. a lot more complicated and 2. gives them access to the sites admin backend.
I don't care either way just so long as the society is happy. At the moment the gallery is live for trialling, as like everything it has its own brand of quirks that i need to get used to. For this, I would appreciate it if anyone with a collection of photos would like to try playing with it, creating more galleries etc... --Drac