How does the Recent Uploaded Photos Gallery work now?

The Recent Uploaded Photos Gallery seems to work differently now. I

used to be able to upload a photo and it would, more or less,

instantly appear in the gallery. I now have photos as far back as Oct

2nd that only have only a handful of views.

 

My assumption is that the Gallery now only contains a finite amount of

photos that are moved out after a cretin amount of time. Is this

correct? If this is the case, perhaps the time should be a little

shorter and the amount of photos in the gallery increased several

fold. There aren�t enough photos in there to look at it every day for

a half an hour or so, like I usually do.

 

I hate to think how long it�s going to take for the series of photos I

just uploaded to get displayed.

 

Thanks!

Jason,

 

I had noticed this as well, but I think it is really a factor of how many images are being uploaded. Lately, Photo.net seems to be getting flooded with new images, and the Gallery only shows 9 or so images simulatenously, so the probability of a single new image getting randomly showcased in the gallery is lower.

 

Perhaps somebody from the staff can correct me if I'm mistaken.

 

Cheers,

It would be nice if there was a way to see new photos... like the top photos... there should be a new photos gallery. otherwise once the photo is gone out of the rather small "recent uploads" basket... they're gone unless they recieve enough ratings/comments/views to make it into a top photo category.

I have posted several times about this problem and e-mailed photo.net with no response. Also if you observe closely some pictures are staying on the Recent Photos Gallery in some case for more than a day. I have uploaded at least 30 pictures since Sept. 30, when this problem seemed to have started, and not one of them has showed up. Views on my photos have been in most cases "0" to just a few. I can't believe more members have not noticed this and are complaining.

I joined photo.net in October, 2000. At that time, you were fairly likely to get some feedback when you posted a photo. As the membership and volume of uploads has grown, this has changed. The time a photo spends on "Most recent uploads" has declined, and the likelihood that it will show up in "Randomly selected recent uploads" has declined. At this point, a photo is not likely to get <i>any</i> significant number of views, much less ratings and/or comments, unless it is selected by an elf/editor to be in the <a href="http://www.photo.net/gallery/photocritique/">"Rate selected recent photos"</a> queue (this is how it is referred to on the photo.net Home Page; at the Gallery page it is called the "Editor's Selections") . However, the number of photos in that queue can't be expanded, and the number of photos getting uploaded keeps growing; consequently, it is getting harder and harder to make that cut. The ability to upload a photo here and get feedback about it is a great resource, but as more and people attempt to make use of it, it becomes less and less available. Photo.net could increase the value of this resource by rationing it -- for example, by limiting photo uploads to subscriber members, and limiting them to, say, one photo per week -- but I don't expect that to happen. So, I have basically given up on photo.net as a resource for getting feedback about my photography.

Check out the way photosig.com does it. Basically they give points for critiquing. If someone (anyone) found the critique useful they can give it a thumb up. Or if the critique sucked... they could give it a thumbs down. Members have two "ratings" one for critiquing, and one for uploading. So... like I said before. It'd be nice to implement something like that. If you give people a reward for their efforts... they're more likely to invest the time.

 

What happens most of the time, is that people can't take constructive criticism, and use the ratings to retaliate for what they don't like. So... it discourages honest critiquing. So... my point is just that... give brownie points for good crits (I don't mean just from the photographer, but anyone that reads the critique, should be able to give it a thumbs up or down... it's more valid than a... "thanks for the nice comment"

 

They also have a one photo per day upload limit, untill you get to some status level and then it's two or something.

This is in response to a comment in a posting by Christopher. Just yesterday I gave an unfavorable rating with comment. Later I received a slamming on one of my decent photos from that person plus an e-mail from that person slamming be personally. I don't usually give many comments and when I do, I do so with nothing but honesty.

I have personally been given many ratings that were low without comment. Let it be so, life goes on.

I should have spell checked my first post to catch that "simulatenously".

 

Dave: where do you go now for requesting critiques? Why you think it's unlikely the uploads get rationed?

 

I wonder what the elves think about rationing uploads, since it will help with the problem they see looming in the horizon about running out of space. I'm not in pro of some suggestions I've read about ostracizing people that post bad photos (somebody had suggested that people who received several bad ratings were banned from the site, believe it or not); but rationing uploads would probably serve to discourage those users who want Photo.net just for storing their family albums, and would return it to its original photo discussion purpose.

 

Cheers,

Well, I just uploaded a new photo and after reloading the Gallery a number of times, it showed up. Seems there was just a issue, between September 30th and October 5th I assume, and it has now been fixed. Now I need to reupload the photos that didn't get shown. Bummer.

Ricardo: To answer your first question, I don't go <i>anywhere</i> to get critiques of my photos anymore. I continue to value photo.net for the interesting and informative content in the forums, but I no longer think of it as a place where I can get feedback on my photography.

 

<p>You asked about my view that there was not likely to be any rationing of the right to upload photos. Before I respond, I should qualify my earlier comments somewhat. I acknowledge that there have been some efforts made here at photo.net to control volume, for example, the limitation on the number of postings that can be made to the photocritique forum, and the limitation on portfolio size. However, it is my sense that when measured against the overall volume that pours in, particularly the volume of photo uploads, these are not significant. Certainly, they seem not to have had much effect on slowing the rate of growth in the number of images uploaded. There are still many more photos uploaded every day than can be run through the "Rate selected recent photos" queue.

 

<p>The reason that I don't expect any significant rationing of the critique/rating/comment resource to occur here at photo.net, is because it is in the nature of websites (especially those that derive some of their support from advertising) to continually seek increased volume. The photo rating function is one of the biggest draws here at photo.net -- there is a tremendous amount of interest in that photo rating function � just take a look at the size of the current <a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=003opA">Ratings Normalization</a> thread. Any change which seems to be one which would make it harder for someone to get a photo viewed/rated/commented on, will probably be perceived as running counter to this interest, and as being potentially unpopular, and will therefore be disfavored.

 

<p>Sometimes I think that what has occurred here at photo.net with the rating/comment/critique resource is an example of the kind phenomenon that was discussed in Garrett Hardin's "<a href="http://www.constitution.org/cmt/tragcomm.htm">The Tragedy Of The Commons</a>", and, with specific reference to internet systems, in Howard Rheingold's "<a href="http://www.well.com/user/hlr/tomorrow/tomorrowcommons.html">The Tragedy Of The Electronic Commons</a>". What you have is a resource --upload a photo, and (maybe) get some feedback about it -- that is available at no charge to members of a community. Because there is no charge, and no limit on the amount of use which may be made of it, there is no incentive for any individual member of the community to limit their use of that resource. However, as more and more members of the community use the resource more and more, its overall value declines.

 

<p>Perhaps one way to address the situation would be to create <i>multiple</i> "Rate selected recent photos" queues, say, 10 of them. Whenever a user clicked on a link to go to that page, they would randomly be sent to one of those queues. This would mean that any uploaded photo would have 10 times the chance of being placed in a "Rate selected recent photos" queue, in which there would be 1/10 th the number of people working their way through and doing rating. The overall odds of getting feedback would be the same, but the feedback would be more evenly distributed. But do I expect this to happen? Not really.

The photo.net gallery was just broken for a while. The photo I reuploaded only had 5 views after 3 days, the first time I uploaded it. The second time, less then 12 hours later, it has 62 views.

 

Moving on to the issue with photo.net being too crowded. I personally would like to see only Patrons having the ability to upload; it�s only $25 a year. Even as a poor college student, I can afford that and I�m not the main demographic here. This would weed out most of the noise. Unfortunately it might get rid of some of the good photographers on this site. However, it�s the only way I could see photo.net working as a critique site.

 

The obvious downside to this, from photo.net�s perspective, would be the potential loss in advertisement revenue. I�m going to go ahead and guess that ads make up the vast majority of their income. The increase in money from patrons might not offset this. But hey, I�m just a computer science major; I seriously don�t know anything about business.

Seriously... you can create all the facilities for critiquing you want... but until you encourage critiquing (ie rewarding good critiquers) critiquing won't improve much. everyone on here has eyes, and they see the images, but it's difficult to learn to constructively critique. But it IS a skill that can be learned and improved. So as I said before... I think it's just as important to rate critiques as it is to rate the photos.<BR><BR>By critiquing a critique you assign a value to an individual critic. It would provide an easy method for selecting the "elves" and there could even be a "top critics" section, where top rated critics would be showcased. We could all gleen from their critiques of photos. Also, by having that section, invariably their photos would get seen more, so again, more encouragement for critiquing. I seem to be the only one that's even talking about this tho... seems like a simple concept to me (not necessarily in implementation, but just in usage)

I really like that idea Christopher. More so then mine. Who would be the correct person to email about this? Brian Mottershead? Or, perhaps you should just create a new topic about it, here in the forum.

I do believe that Brian is watching this thread. :)