Re-revisited: photos per thread limit?

Speaking of photos and TAY, it doesn't seem like much ever came of the "Ski Route Photos" section. Just an observation.

i've been reading this thread as it has gone along and I figured, what the heck, might as well put in my two cents as well.

Other sites such as teletips and tgr seem to end up with lots of trip reports that just have too many pictures...as much as I enjoy seeing cool pictures, I really enjoy reading about the skiing trip.  I think the quality of the written trip report is what makes TR's on TAY unique amongst the other skiing forums.   I wouldn't want to see that change if all of a sudden it was a free for all with how many pictures could get posted.

Many folks on this site do far better with the pics than my little Canon Powershot and I do...but I find that adding links into the text a perfectly acceptable way to check out all the pictures as I read the report.

I guess my preference would be to stick with the 800x800 pixel max, maybe go up to as many as 5 or 6 big pictures and then post links to other pictures.    But whatever is easiest for Charles and the moderators is just fine with me.

Sky, I've noticed that too and been thinking maybe we should just delete it??

As for photo dumping, that's true, I wouldn't want TAY Photos to become one of those sites. I think that it could be set up to limit that possibility, however, and not require a lot of admin time afterwards. The official policy would be that TAY photo storage was intended to be used specifically for photos posted on this forum, and the technical limitations on their use would thus be justified. There are behind the scenes ways of preventing "hot linking" or "direct linking" so that photos stored on TAY could not be linked to from other domains, ie. made to display in other forums (in fact, that's the way things are set up now - hope it's still working but I guess I should check again). Also, the storage software could be set so that the maximum size stored was 800x600, regardless of the dimensions of the original photo. This ought to considerably limit the amount of disk space taken up by photos. Photo storage systems also can be set to limit the amount of disk space available for each account. I'm pretty ignorant of the photo storage scene, though, so maybe I'm being overly optimistic about how well this might work.

The photo storage idea came to mind to address these issues: 1) lots of people don't seem to have a web space to put their photos, or at least have never learned how to use it, 2) lots of people don't seem to have learned how to process their photos (eg. resize, at a minimum), 3) a photo storage system could be set up to automatically generate both 800x600 and some kind of thumbnail photo from each original, 4) this forum's photo upload feature limits how the photos can be used in posting (all bunched at the bottom), and 5) a photo storage system that automatically generated thumbnail sized photos would mean no messing around with the code of this forum to generate thumbnails internally.

The question of photo storage is independent of the question of how many photos to allow to be displayed in a thread. It's three now and this could be changed at any time. There seemed to be considerable interest in allowing a moderate to unlimited number of thumbnails to be displayed in a thread, in addition to a few 800x600s, so I've been trying to figure out how this might best be accomplished.

Charles,

You mentioned that the new system would allow posters to place thumbnails anywhere in a posting using the IMG tag. I'm wondering, would this allow horizontal control as well as vertical control. In other words, could we place thumbnails side-by-side or would they end up vertically aligned, like a totem pole?

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Followup: I ran a little test and yes, we can place photos side-by-side using the IMG tag. So no worries.

I think I've been pursuaded that wholesale hosting of photos here is not such a good idea. Tom from nwhikers.net has been very generous with advice and also with a script that automatically generates thumbnails. I have installed it and it seems to work very well. Two examples:

   

Each thumbnail is a link to the larger photo - clicking the thumbnail opens a new window or tab containing the full-sized photo from which the thumbnail was generated. So far I haven't set up the posting page so that the thumbnail code can be inserted with the click of a button, but I will be looking into how best to accomplish this.

When that is done then the auto thumbnailing function will be available to anyone who has their photos posted somewhere on the internet (personal site, photo storage site, etc), but it still won't be available to people who upload photos to the TAY server as they post.

Tom gave me some information about the imageshack.us photo hosting service and the ability to add code here which would allow people to upload their photos to imageshack directly from the posting page. This process would also allow easy access to the URLs for the uploaded photos, which would be needed in order to use the automatic thumbnail function.

I will be working on these remaining issues as I have time. I'd like to delay a decision on the technically simpler question of how many photos are allowed to be displayed in a post/thread until we see how well all of these other things work out.

A very big thanks to Tom for all of his help!

I am jumping into the discussion a bit late. The subject of trip photos is very near to my heart. I have almost never skied, canoed or hiked without a camera. I, obviously, love to record my adventures. While my writing style is unique perhaps, I do not think that it meets my photo standards. We are not all talented with the use of words. So I would love to be able to display more pictures. I will respectively adhere to the rules until they change and just add a link to additional photos.

Bob Wiebe