This comment is very important together with Baldurs. Zoochat's gallery is a unique source of information. Don't destroy it.
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This comment is very important together with Baldurs. Zoochat's gallery is a unique source of information. Don't destroy it.
Maybe if SIM could restrict the purge to certain countries, or even certain zoos? That would solve the imbalance wouldn't it?
I agree with your point, people will only look at, say, the Malaysia-wildlife gallery since few people are lucky enough to go and post photos. I look very occasionally to see what sort of wildlife you can see there, but the photos rarely have many views since they're in a less used gallery. So, would it be possible to restrict it to the popular countries (UK, USA, Aus) or even the popular zoos (Chester, San Diego etc)?
I agree with your point, people will only look at, say, the Malaysia-wildlife gallery since few people are lucky enough to go and post photos. I look very occasionally to see what sort of wildlife you can see there, but the photos rarely have many views since they're in a less used gallery. So, would it be possible to restrict it to the popular countries (UK, USA, Aus) or even the popular zoos (Chester, San Diego etc)?
Zooplantman
Well-Known Member
Sim,
Yes, thanks for keeping things going. You did what you had to and what is your responsibility to do.
Now that the crisis is past, we can think through the next steps. As others have said, an automated system has ugly faults. Happily, since you turned the question over to the Forum, you have gotten great ideas:
1, Look into other methods of hosting
2. Enable gallery posters to delete their own pictures (if there is no discussion). I would add: promote a month of "clear the crap", encouraging us all to do our editing
3. If automation is needed, make it selective... say only for the overly engorged zoos
and
4. Create an icon for the galleries where Forumers can indicate that this picture is unnecessary. When a picture reaches a certain threshold it may be referred to a Moderator for deletion or simply deleted automatically.
Even though you brought this whole issue up a few months ago it is worth re-stating to us all: don't up-load everything you have. We do not need 23 shots of the same animal on the same day in the same spot.
Oh here's an idea! (#5.!) A level of Zoochat Membership: if you want to dump every picture you own on the Forum then pay to do so! Pay big!
Yes, thanks for keeping things going. You did what you had to and what is your responsibility to do.
Now that the crisis is past, we can think through the next steps. As others have said, an automated system has ugly faults. Happily, since you turned the question over to the Forum, you have gotten great ideas:
1, Look into other methods of hosting
2. Enable gallery posters to delete their own pictures (if there is no discussion). I would add: promote a month of "clear the crap", encouraging us all to do our editing
3. If automation is needed, make it selective... say only for the overly engorged zoos
and
4. Create an icon for the galleries where Forumers can indicate that this picture is unnecessary. When a picture reaches a certain threshold it may be referred to a Moderator for deletion or simply deleted automatically.
Even though you brought this whole issue up a few months ago it is worth re-stating to us all: don't up-load everything you have. We do not need 23 shots of the same animal on the same day in the same spot.
Oh here's an idea! (#5.!) A level of Zoochat Membership: if you want to dump every picture you own on the Forum then pay to do so! Pay big!
I'm not too keen on this idea. There is no doubt people would pay if they could, but some of us are only young and simply can't afford it (even for adults, after housing bills/food etc it would be a struggle to add another bill on). I can see what you mean about only charge after a certain amount of photos, but what should that certain amount be? Say you were allowed 200 photos a month before paying, what if I visited 4-5 zoos and took way over that amount of good photos of different things, I'd want to share all of them. That, and for new members that have a back-log of photos they want to post, if they could only do so many a month but they were taking so many more it would never go down.
This sounds like a really daft idea, but what if we use the galleries as reference for what animals the zoo has and what enclosures look like (adding old photos into that for history), but for general photography users could link to a flickr or photobucket site?
Zooplantman
Well-Known Member
I like the daft idea.
My suggestion was aimed more at getting us all to think about what we upload before we dump all those repetitive shots onto the Forum... not to penalize avid zoogoers. I guess it needs a little work
Just to clarify, are the old photos lost for all time?
I'm not a techhead, so apologies if this isn't possible... but what about photos stay in the 'gallery' for, say, 3 months (unless they get x number of replies, in which they stay longer) and those that are culled could then be available as compressed zip files?
I'm not a techhead, so apologies if this isn't possible... but what about photos stay in the 'gallery' for, say, 3 months (unless they get x number of replies, in which they stay longer) and those that are culled could then be available as compressed zip files?
I like the daft idea.
My suggestion was aimed more at getting us all to think about what we upload before we dump all those repetitive shots onto the Forum... not to penalize avid zoogoers. I guess it needs a little work
Thank you
I do see a potential in your idea, you are right that it would make people think before posting which is something that is certainly needed. To be honest, on reflection I can't see even avid photographers and zoo-goers posting over 200 a month.
If moderation is a voluntary thing on here, do we have gallery moderators? If not, maybe we could get a couple to manually judge photos on a day-to-day/week-to-week basis, that way a really good photograph that has been unfortunate to not get a view could stay, would also solve the problem of the auto one taking out photos from lesser viewed galleries?
While I can understand that the zoos with a massive amount of photos needed to be streamlined, for the most part I believe that this "pruning" of the ZooChat gallery is a terrible tragedy. I personally have had over 9,000 photos eliminated (50% of my overall total!) and since my computer uploads on average 35 photos per hour that means that 257 hours of my time has now been wasted.
I had many duplicate photos from only 2 zoos, while another 90 zoos and aquariums have been seriously chopped of historic photos. Loads of photos from Trinidad + Tobago, my 2-week 2006 zoo tour, my 6-week Aussie zoo tour of 2007, my 8-week 2008 tour, etc, have all vanished into thin air. Exhibits change over time and some of the zoos that lost photos didn't even have that many photos in the gallery to begin with.
I've had a day to think it over and the entire crisis is extremely disheartening. I've invested so much energy and time visting zoos, taking loads of photos, and then eventually coming home and spending hours uploading them...and then within half a day 50% of them are erased (perhaps forever?). I still have at least a dozen different zoos and aquariums from my 2010 summer road trip that I have yet to upload, including 2 zoos with zero photos in the ZooChat gallery. What would be the point now? In a year 50% of the photos would be erased, and for all the hundreds of new members that join each year those photos would never be seen by anyone.
For those folks that think that this is a great idea, consider the effort that many people have put into uploading thousands of photos from zoos on various continents. Of the 969 zoos and aquariums listed on this site I fully agree that before yesterday there were at least 20 zoos that had galleries that had grown exponentially to the point where they were far too vast to properly browse. Aside from those 20 zoos the other 949 were perfectly fine!!! Now numerous smaller zoos in the gallery with very few photos have seen their totals ravaged by this "pruning". Many Asian zoos have been decimated of photos, and with over 40,000 eliminated from this site the number of smaller, less-popular zoos that have been affected is mind-numbing.
I've had enormous respect for this site, I've paid money each year to use this site as a supporter, I've emailed a bewildering number of folks here with personal messages, I've met at least 7 friends in person while visiting zoos, and I've been a very active participant for almost 3 years. However, now I've lost faith in ZooChat.
I had many duplicate photos from only 2 zoos, while another 90 zoos and aquariums have been seriously chopped of historic photos. Loads of photos from Trinidad + Tobago, my 2-week 2006 zoo tour, my 6-week Aussie zoo tour of 2007, my 8-week 2008 tour, etc, have all vanished into thin air. Exhibits change over time and some of the zoos that lost photos didn't even have that many photos in the gallery to begin with.I've had a day to think it over and the entire crisis is extremely disheartening. I've invested so much energy and time visting zoos, taking loads of photos, and then eventually coming home and spending hours uploading them...and then within half a day 50% of them are erased (perhaps forever?). I still have at least a dozen different zoos and aquariums from my 2010 summer road trip that I have yet to upload, including 2 zoos with zero photos in the ZooChat gallery. What would be the point now? In a year 50% of the photos would be erased, and for all the hundreds of new members that join each year those photos would never be seen by anyone.
For those folks that think that this is a great idea, consider the effort that many people have put into uploading thousands of photos from zoos on various continents. Of the 969 zoos and aquariums listed on this site I fully agree that before yesterday there were at least 20 zoos that had galleries that had grown exponentially to the point where they were far too vast to properly browse. Aside from those 20 zoos the other 949 were perfectly fine!!! Now numerous smaller zoos in the gallery with very few photos have seen their totals ravaged by this "pruning". Many Asian zoos have been decimated of photos, and with over 40,000 eliminated from this site the number of smaller, less-popular zoos that have been affected is mind-numbing.
I've had enormous respect for this site, I've paid money each year to use this site as a supporter, I've emailed a bewildering number of folks here with personal messages, I've met at least 7 friends in person while visiting zoos, and I've been a very active participant for almost 3 years. However, now I've lost faith in ZooChat.
snowleopard,
If no one was viewing those 9000 photos you uploaded, wasn't your time already wasted?
I think there are some who feel uploading to ZooChat is a status symbol of sorts and they feel they are in competition to have the most photos uploaded. Those who feel this way seem to upload without any regard as to whether or not anyone else will find that photo useful.
I understand the need for an automated purge, I mean who really has the time to be manually sorting these galleries. As Sim has said, this is not a historical archive, if that's what we were going for, there are better ways to approach it. Ultimately if people aren't viewing it, than it's presence is not justified.
If no one was viewing those 9000 photos you uploaded, wasn't your time already wasted?
I think there are some who feel uploading to ZooChat is a status symbol of sorts and they feel they are in competition to have the most photos uploaded. Those who feel this way seem to upload without any regard as to whether or not anyone else will find that photo useful.
I understand the need for an automated purge, I mean who really has the time to be manually sorting these galleries. As Sim has said, this is not a historical archive, if that's what we were going for, there are better ways to approach it. Ultimately if people aren't viewing it, than it's presence is not justified.
devilfish
Well-Known Member
Like snowleopard, I find it a shame that so many less frequently visited zoos from around the world are losing out a lot more. As an international zoo forum, many of these zoos don't get updated often, but it's nice to have them documented. I also agree that the galleries need significant editing, but would it be possible to keep a minimum number of photos in each gallery to avoid losing photos from little zoos completely?
I think Zooplantman's summary of suggestions is excellent. I would like to add one though; most users submit full-sized photos to the gallery - would it be possible to further compress images during the upload process in order to save space?
I think Zooplantman's summary of suggestions is excellent. I would like to add one though; most users submit full-sized photos to the gallery - would it be possible to further compress images during the upload process in order to save space?
Just a couple of thoughts from someone who doesn't upload photos but does spend a great deal of time looking at them.
1. I think it is important that the galleries don't become so huge and unwieldy to be impossible to browse.
2. I think it is also important to recognise one of zoochat's unique strengths in that there are a great many pictures of zoos and enclosures rather than just animal shots.
Perhaps there could be a gallery which is only these kind of zoo/enclosure pictures with another of a limited range of close ups, animals portraits etc. This way it could perhaps be easier to browse and see what the various zoos look like rather than seeing a whole load of animal pictures which good or bad could be found as easily on flickr for example.
I agree that ultimately, zoochat's function is not to be the global archive of animal photographs and that would be a quite different project.
1. I think it is important that the galleries don't become so huge and unwieldy to be impossible to browse.
2. I think it is also important to recognise one of zoochat's unique strengths in that there are a great many pictures of zoos and enclosures rather than just animal shots.
Perhaps there could be a gallery which is only these kind of zoo/enclosure pictures with another of a limited range of close ups, animals portraits etc. This way it could perhaps be easier to browse and see what the various zoos look like rather than seeing a whole load of animal pictures which good or bad could be found as easily on flickr for example.
I agree that ultimately, zoochat's function is not to be the global archive of animal photographs and that would be a quite different project.
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As one of the few Latin American members of zoochat, I want to support Childonias message. This is the only really global social network on the internet dedicated to zoos and that is what makes it so nice. I understand completely that it was neccesary to trim down the galleries, and i have also seen many pictures that were repetive, boring or simply awfull to look out. But it also important to keep ( and encourage) the galleries and pictures that are already there that give this unique global view. There are certainly galleries that are too excessive to be viewed well I agree. Some are very repetitive.In my short time as a member i have tried basically to add photos of animals that i had seen rarely on zoochat, such as volcano rabbit, mexican brocket, lear´s macaw, bearded saki, a unusual species of titi monkey, etc. In this sense, i am very very saddened by the mutilation of snowleopard's gallery on the zoos and wildlife of trinidad and tobago, because a valuable register of a zoological collection in an area with great biological diversity has been altered and it may not be replaced. Why this particular gallery ? It was not too big. Please do not alter those contributions that are unique. I hope these considerations well be made for the next trimming.
As someone of has participated in teaching administrative duties, i also know that unpopular decesions may be accepted if people affected know beforehand what will occur. I suggest that the trimming be made annually on a specific date made known to the members with a list of galleries likely to be affected. That way members can decide to recuperate their contributions, in case they have lost the originals.
Muchas gracias por su atención.
As someone of has participated in teaching administrative duties, i also know that unpopular decesions may be accepted if people affected know beforehand what will occur. I suggest that the trimming be made annually on a specific date made known to the members with a list of galleries likely to be affected. That way members can decide to recuperate their contributions, in case they have lost the originals.
Muchas gracias por su atención.
jbnbsn99
Well-Known Member
I think we need to be asking a deeper question. What is the ultimate purpose of ZooChat?
Simple answer is a place where people who have a similar love/interest in zoos can come and discuss and learn.
As a repository of photos there is absolutely a place for it. I love seeing photos from great zoos from around the world. But, there needs to be some moderation. I have absolutely no desire to look through any of the bloated galleries of some of the UK zoos. Even if there is something of value in it it will be so hard to find that it is practically useless.
As members we have a duty to only upload photos that are worthy of being uploaded and viewed by other people all across the world. No matter how much we love our own home zoos, there is a limit to how many shots you can have of a particular animal/exhibit. Recently over 2,000 photos of one single zoo have been uploaded by a single person. This is overbearing and ultimately meaningless. The number of photos you have in the photo gallery should not be a status symbol on the forum (this coming from one of the top uploaders). When I first joined I was over zealous in my uploading, but now I have gotten to a point where I upload 1/3 or so of the photos I take (if I ever do upload them to begin with).
The ability for uploaders to delete their own, non-commented photos is welcome, and I say absolutely needed for the betterment of the site.
For lesser known zoos that are not visited regularly (if ever visited more than once by a lone member), the majority of those photos should have a place on here.
Maybe the best solution is to have a 2nd site devoted entirely to photos that can have a much larger capacity than a forum can hold.
Simple answer is a place where people who have a similar love/interest in zoos can come and discuss and learn.
As a repository of photos there is absolutely a place for it. I love seeing photos from great zoos from around the world. But, there needs to be some moderation. I have absolutely no desire to look through any of the bloated galleries of some of the UK zoos. Even if there is something of value in it it will be so hard to find that it is practically useless.
As members we have a duty to only upload photos that are worthy of being uploaded and viewed by other people all across the world. No matter how much we love our own home zoos, there is a limit to how many shots you can have of a particular animal/exhibit. Recently over 2,000 photos of one single zoo have been uploaded by a single person. This is overbearing and ultimately meaningless. The number of photos you have in the photo gallery should not be a status symbol on the forum (this coming from one of the top uploaders). When I first joined I was over zealous in my uploading, but now I have gotten to a point where I upload 1/3 or so of the photos I take (if I ever do upload them to begin with).
The ability for uploaders to delete their own, non-commented photos is welcome, and I say absolutely needed for the betterment of the site.
For lesser known zoos that are not visited regularly (if ever visited more than once by a lone member), the majority of those photos should have a place on here.
Maybe the best solution is to have a 2nd site devoted entirely to photos that can have a much larger capacity than a forum can hold.
Unfortunately, it was always going to be the case - no matter how we did it - that you were going to be the one person the most affected by any prune or cull of photos from the gallery since more than 10% of the 130,000 photos were from you in the first place!
I regret needing to take such drastic action and I understand (and greatly appreciate) the effort you have gone to in uploading them in the first place, but the fact is we have too many photos and I needed to remove some of them - any in pure numbers of photos removed, yours would always have be culled the most since there were simply so many of them!
that means that 257 hours of my time has now been wasted.
Not wasted at all!
Only photos which have not been viewed by many people and those which have been in the galleries for more than 1 year have been removed.
Any new photos you upload will remain in the gallery for AT LEAST a year - that should be plenty of time for people to view them, and if they are popular enough, they will remain in the gallery indefinitely. I will also be looking at alternatives to regular pruning to see if we can manage the gallery more effectively, so this may all change anyway.
Due to the high volumes of photos in many of the galleries and the fact that there was simply no effective way to view the changes in a single exhibit over time via the current gallery mechanism - I don't think there was terribly much value in this anyway.
I would like to develop a better way of doing things. I've been spending quite a bit of time thinking about how we might be able to capture more specific information about a zoo, its animals and exhibits from a historical perspective and present it in a more meaningful and useful way.
The ideas I've come up with so far all involve a mechanism very different to that currently in use by the currently photo gallery - so you would need to upload any specific photos for this purpose again anyway.
The point would be that people will have at least year to view all of your photos, and the best of them will be around well beyond that.
This was never intended to be an archival service - it was to encourage the discussion about zoos and animals. If some of the photos you've uploaded aren't being viewed and discussed, then they aren't serving any meaningful purpose in the gallery anyway.
Like I said, I think we can create something far more useful with our photos - but it requires us to take a different direction. In the meantime, there is still plenty of value to be found in the existing gallery - and any photos you upload will have plenty of time for people to view and comment on them.
I do regret needing to take this action, but like I said - I had little choice and had to act quickly to preserve what we have.
I was going to say the same thing - I've always compressed my images before uploading (mainly because it's quicker to upload) and they are often 10% or less the size of the original.
Hix
Won't actually make any difference. No matter what size the original photo uploaded, we only keep a 1600x1200 (maximum), sized version as well as the medium sized and thumbnail sized versions of the photos - the original full resolution photo is discarded to save space, that's always the way the gallery has operated.
I do still recommend resizing a copy of your photos down to no larger than 1600x1200 before you upload, it will save on upload time for you, save bandwidth for me, and save processing time on the server for conversions. However, uploading full sized images will still work if that's all you can do.
Just one other comment on a suggestion by someone else about compression - you don't generally get any effective additional compression by trying to "zip" a jpeg image file, since jpegs are already compressed internally and the nature of photographs means that there is very little repeated data which can be stripped out to save space (as compared to bitmaps, line art, or word documents and such, which do usually compress well).
What if you shoot in RAW and convert it to JPEG later, it stays as something like 8mb for some photos.
Also, I am thinking about my flickr suggestion, do you like it? Maybe we could have a topic somewhere (maybe pinned) where people can post a link to their flickr site (or photobucket or whatever) and make it like a 'user gallery' rather than a zoo gallery?
adrian1963
Well-Known Member
I will be opening a thread in the photographic forum for people if they have a flickr/photobucket or any other type of photographic site that they put most of there work then this will surely release a large area of space up in future for the members to put one photograph of a species taken and not loads of photographs of the same species taken on the same day
I hope this will help
I hope this will help
I'm sure it will. Can it be pinned in the photography forum though, or would it be better off here? I think it should be pinned, otherwise it'll just get knocked back down and off the front page, then the problem starts again when people don't see it.
Flickr is fine if you are just looking to share photos with a select group of users who will follow your individual photo streams personally, but it doesn't really integrate with a like-minded community like posting them on ZooChat does.
The kind of solution I'm looking at is multi-faceted:
1. photo galleries become user-centric (ie. you get a personal gallery with a certain amount of space allocated and it is up to you to manage that space). You can upload whatever you like within your personal space limits. I intend for the limits to be fairly generous.
2. select photos may be submitted (or nominated) for inclusion in a zoo gallery and if enough votes are achieved, then the photo becomes a part of the site gallery (not just part of the personal gallery) and no longer counts towards an individual's space usage.
3. Photo storage will be migrated to a cloud based service such as Amazon S3 (or similar) to maximise storage space and avoid issues like we faced recently.
So basically, photos don't automatically get added to the zoo's gallery - they have to be nominated and voted in. This way only the best will be shown in each gallery. Individual members can upload a heap of photos about their trip and post a link to their personal gallery in a discussion thread / trip journal / zoo review / etc ... so you can view all photos taken by Snowleopard or Hix or whoever for that trip. You can also browse the zoo galleries which showcase the best of the photos from all users.
I'm also thinking of some type of mechanism to allow the community to document the history of a zoo/exhibit/animal - perhaps a Wiki allowing members to collect photos and create a timeline showing how things have changed or developed over time. I'm still thinking through some of the details here on this one - it will be a lot of work to make this into something useful, but it could potentially be an incredibly interesting part of the site.
The kind of solution I'm looking at is multi-faceted:
1. photo galleries become user-centric (ie. you get a personal gallery with a certain amount of space allocated and it is up to you to manage that space). You can upload whatever you like within your personal space limits. I intend for the limits to be fairly generous.
2. select photos may be submitted (or nominated) for inclusion in a zoo gallery and if enough votes are achieved, then the photo becomes a part of the site gallery (not just part of the personal gallery) and no longer counts towards an individual's space usage.
3. Photo storage will be migrated to a cloud based service such as Amazon S3 (or similar) to maximise storage space and avoid issues like we faced recently.
So basically, photos don't automatically get added to the zoo's gallery - they have to be nominated and voted in. This way only the best will be shown in each gallery. Individual members can upload a heap of photos about their trip and post a link to their personal gallery in a discussion thread / trip journal / zoo review / etc ... so you can view all photos taken by Snowleopard or Hix or whoever for that trip. You can also browse the zoo galleries which showcase the best of the photos from all users.
I'm also thinking of some type of mechanism to allow the community to document the history of a zoo/exhibit/animal - perhaps a Wiki allowing members to collect photos and create a timeline showing how things have changed or developed over time. I'm still thinking through some of the details here on this one - it will be a lot of work to make this into something useful, but it could potentially be an incredibly interesting part of the site.