Let's talk about Posting Pictures on the site

[WVBowhunter]

I'll lay this out pretty simple and let y'all decide.

As you know we are a free web site and we don't post stars and silly stuff by your name for contributions and things like this, but we have a dilema with the posting of pictures,

First let me say we currently have two methods:

Our first and preferred method is the Gallery in which we have several categories to put your pictures like blues, flatheads your boats etc. and that is our preferred usage as anyone can come in and look around and view your catches, boats etc. To upload your pictures to this its a pretty simple task to click on the Gallery and the the upload button then pick the desired section and off they go into the gallery. We do have a 1mb limit on the size of the file and honestly you don't need that much resolution to have a great looking picture on a website or even to print some pretty decent pictures for the family album. As our digital cameras progress you'll see them with 10 mb or greater capabilities which will produce studio quality prints, but it isn't necessary for looking at on your monitor,,so do yourself a favor and change the setting on your camera for 1 mb or less, believe me you wont know the difference when posting on the site or any other site for that matter. So if ya got some pictures that are to big to go in, just resize em. We have a link posted for resizing your images that is free. You can go back and retrieve that image anytime to post in a thread by using the direct link url located below your picture in gallery.

The second method is an embedded album within Vbulletin (our website software) in which you use the attach function that everybody seems so fond of. There are several problems with this method (it also has a 1 mb size limit and photos will have to be resized for that as well) First problem is the file is stored similarly to the first method, but unless you are reading the exact post that it was used in - nobody will ever see it again and its just setting there unused and wasting memory space. If we delete the photo's in the "album" space after a period of time say 6 mos then if somebody aims to go back and read that post - the pictures will be missing, possibly making poor reading for a new user or somebody that just wanted to see that big catch the thread was about. So loosing the picture in the post is not an option in my opinion

The posting of a picture while using the attach function is automatic which I suppose is what makes it so popular. The posting of a picture from our Gallery requires you to click on the "insert picture button" up in message parameters box and insert the direct link url found under your picture in the gallery -- I know right click copy and paste into the space provided. This function also works with pictures you have stored on other website galleries and photo storage sites like photo bucket but this to has many drawbacks and only one attribute and that is it doesn't use any memory space on our server. The bad thing is people let their photobucket accounts expire or the image is erased off another site and you end up with a little black box with a red X in it telling us the image is no longer stored.

So as I see it we have a couple options, We can purchase more and more storage on the server,,this will keep occuring over the life of the website, and we'll have to do this as it stands now, but we could literally cut our storage in half by only using one gallery or album. We can reduce the size of images uploaded and also cut the size you view and save in that matter, but the quality would go down. We could ask for donations or place a fee for uploading images and that is not popular with me or any of the admins for that matter. And finally we could use a couple of "photo moderators" in which they could save your attached photos, place them in the Gallery and then edit your post - doing away with the attached image and linking the photo thru the gallery,,then at some later date deleting them from the album database. This last method is quite intensive and will drive a "photo moderator" cut and paste mad in pretty short order.

I am absolutely not requesting anyone to cut back on the number of pictures they post as they are an intregal part of the site and we all love em, but just want to hear some of your ideas concerning this matter so we can make the right choice. The tiny pictures (thumbnails) and lightbox issue has been resolved as it has been turned off, it makes no difference on the amount of memory space used and only affects the loading time of a page with pictures.

[jerry9497]

nobody likes change..

I'm in the online tournement so I'll have to learn it either way, after it becomes second nature maybe it wont seem so bad.

[Pier Pressure]

I take pics w/the camera phone (2 MP) and send them to photobucket from the phone. When I post a pic, all I need to do is copy and paste the link into the body of the message. Thats really simple for me and it doesn't cost this site a dime. I'm all for keeping your costs down and still having pics in fishing reports, cough... cough.... I mean if us NC guys actually posted a real fishing report (Tx catfisherman are pretty tight lipped huh ). Whatever y'all decide is cool w/me, but cheaper is better.