THE most useless site for looking for/critiquing images!!

OK,it must be said.This site has by FAR the best learning

forum/articles,but.... as far as looking at images is concerned ,it

is utter cr*p!!

You try to search by type(say portrait)nuh,no chance

By 'best rated'?The page loads 30 at most and you have no effective

second choice.And these 30 are mostly dreadfully cheap digital

stuff.Yes you can change the score parameters but then you get the

original page choice mixed with SOME others.Still a total of 30,no

second or third pages etc.

I tried to search for a nice sunset i saw on the front page

once.Absolutely ZERO forking chance pal!If it doesn't have sunset in

the title ,you're stuffed.

And what's the deal with thumbnails?The ONLY places i've ever seen

them are on the 'top'rated photo page and my folder page.Thumbnails

are by far the quickest way to look through ANY group of photos,but

photo.net don't have it.

Of couse i wouldn't mind if all photo's(except in the articles) were

just deleted.What's the use of having all those photos if they don't

actually DO anything.It's damn FRUSTRATING knowing there are SOME

photos in here that are among the best i've ever seen,but if i didn't

copy it and keep it when i first saw it(can i realy do that?)i'll

never see it again...

Ron, get a grip. Things will work themselves out. The best thing you could do is comment on some peoples' images and suggest ways to improve their photography. Bitching about it here just puts you in the amateur critic ranks.

this is what the "mark this person as interesting" link on people's home pages is for... also, what do you want the software running the site to do? should it analyze a picture and come up with key words so you can search more easily? If you know how to write such a program i recommend that you quit your day job and start a company.

Ron, we are mostly adults here. You shouldn't be afraid to type out "crap" and "fucking."

Peter, there is no lower age limit that I have seen, and there are some younger viewers here. Posting to a site like this is a bit like shouting in the middle of a busy street; with kids, policemen, your gran, etc, all walking by.... But anyway, us orstralians are way too refined to use that sort of language, right Ron? :)

 

Anyway I tend to agree with the topic, partly because I am too lazy to use the interesting person thingummy. Besides, many of those interesting persons don't update their stuff very often, so once you've browsed..

 

I think this site would benefit greatly from a better interface for posting a picture (eg mandatory keywords, maybe from drop down lists). I also think that multiple thumbnails on the front page would be much better than just one POW and one Critique. Lastly, I think the way in which images are cycled into the Critique box is, to say the least, very puzzling. I have seen many repeats (with 371,153 images????) and there seems to be strange coincidental happenings, like Anna's eye-on-the-water image appearing just after there was a thread about it in the forum. My wanderings suggest a *lot* of excellent images linger unseen after they get their 20 ratings..

 

These are the main reasons I haven't bothered posting more stuff myself (the fact that it is no good has nothing to do with it! ;-)

 

The forums are good here, but I think .usefilm. looks like a better medium for viewing good work.

 

mt

<I>Oh, and psssst, Ron... Don't tell anyone else, but try typing in 50 or even 100 in that little box that says 'max of 30 shown'.<P>

 

;)</I><br>

 

mt

Thanks Mark,Of course you said things with a whole lot of more restraint than i can show at the moment(and the way i would LIKE to say things).Manditory keywords,pages of thumbnails in each category,etc.we need all those if we have ANY hope of finding usefull images.Honestly i think it's WAAAY too late to start now.There are,what,300000+photos on the site with basically no way of finding them except a few at a time.Usually i don't worry about it,i just come here for the good stuff.Just occasionally i though one must state the obvious,no one else seems to be.I KNOW there are some absolute gems in there,but who knows where?

If all you want to do is see sunsets and the like,

check out this folder:

 

http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=142778

I think the software here, while good when first written, is now hopelessly obsolete. But the content and community that has developed in the meantime keeps folks coming back.

To tell the truth, I think it might be an interesting experiment to put in new photo software with some of the features often mentioned (junk the numerical ratings, add mandatory categorization, including (cough) a category for "digital illustrations"), and then let it run for a month or so. After that, purge all the old photos from photo.net.

 

Shock? Horror? Let's face it, the VAST majority of those 300k pics are just sitting there rotting. They don't get enough hits to even bother talking about. This is no slam on their worth, just the reality of dealing with 300k+ of photos within the current photo.net culture and software.

 

I agree with the comment that usefilm.com has *much* better software for dealing with photos. Just not that many users yet, in comparison. I hope that will change.

 

Updating the software here and purging the database might be the best thing that ever happened to photo.net. Time for a housecleaning.

I agree that the gallery system is not highly organized. It only

used a very small percentage of its excellent database capacity.

<p>

I agree that in the mean time, the favorite photographers feature

is a very good tool to bookmark photos. Here is mine:

<p>

<a href="/shared/community-member?user_id=350578">

Yang Fang

</a>

<br>

<a href="/shared/community-member?user_id=24548" >

Steve Bingham

</a>

<br>

<a href="/shared/community-member?user_id=382597" >

Jodie Coston

</a>

<br>

<a href="/shared/community-member?user_id=321228" >

Daniel Bayer

</a>

<br>

<a href="/shared/community-member?user_id=23152" >

Quang-Tuan Luong

</a>

<br>

<a href="/shared/community-member?user_id=356961" >

Julia Liu

</a>

<br>

<a href="/shared/community-member?user_id=357310" >

Ken Thalheimer</a>

<br>

<a href="/shared/community-member?user_id=392018" >

Bill Magee

</a>

<br>

<a href="/shared/community-member?user_id=403930" >

Peter Christoph

</a>

<br>

<a href="/shared/community-member?user_id=53127" >

Leping Zha

</a>

<p>

I posted a thread a few weeks ago to collect the favorite lists, we

could run it again ;-)

<P>

PS. I would wait for a better system to post most of my good

works on photo.net. (Most photos on my photo.net homepage

are links to another site.)

No, the site isn't perfect. But if it bothers people that much, I'd say - ask for your money back.

This was the weekend's biggest whine...until last night's nutbashing between pseudo-heavyweight champ John Ruiz and Kirk Johnson. Granted, Johnson should've been penalized for low blows. But Ruiz is the first I've seen whine his way to victory.

 

Sorry, Ron, not really picking on you. Any excuse to talk boxing is all I need.

... I can only be glad that you don't have easy access to more pages on this site... because after a closer look at your recent comments, I don't think your contributions are anywhere near appropriate nor useful...

<p>

Examples of the critiques you wrote today about Emil Schildt's work:

<p>

"Average at best. Artistically on the right track but it just doesnt turn out well": http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo.tcl?photo_id=900436. You rated this shot 5 and 1.

<p>

or what about this ?... "THE best of the folder easily. Keep this and throw most of the rest.This is a strong style that eather works or doesnt. You owe it to yourself to delete most of the others so as not to detract from the better ones such as this." That was about this picture, which of course you didn't rate since it was the Best according to your own words: http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo.tcl?photo_id=903446.

<p>

Then: "OH,this one is bad!!The pose is 'interesting' but her expression is horrid". That was about Emil's Sphinx picture at http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo.tcl?photo_id=900760

Rated 5 / 1...

<p>

Or this: "Average at best. Artistically on the right track but it just doesnt turn out well": http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo.tcl?photo_id=900436 ... Rated 4 / 2.

<p>

My point is: if you can't explain WHY this or that is crap according to you, why on Earth bother even saying anything ? And why would you need to be so insulting in the first place ? Does it feel good ?

<p>

Come on... PLEASE... Treat people with some respect, and you might gain some as well... Civility is a must. Humility is a luxury. Both combined would make you a happier man, I think...

<p>

And now, if it really makes you feel so great, feel free to throw some venom on my pages too - you can use another name if you don't want to be recognized...:-) OR, you can think about all this, and decide to become a gentleman - if that makes any sense...

<p>

Ciao.

disagree with Marc here, and fairly strongly. This is critique. Ron said what he thinks, and why. True, he didn't go into a lot of details, but in most cases he gave a basic reason. I certainly think his comments were more useful than the usual gush-fest.

 

Yes, his ratings were on the low side, but it *is* a scale of 1 to 10, even though most of the site participants want to ignore that. Where, exactly, was the disrespect from Ron? The fact that he didn't agree with the majority? The fact that he didn't write a novel about each one, or make specific, detailed suggestions?

 

The images in question were elaborately staged. The artist obvously knew what they were doing and, we assume, acheived the effect they were after. If someone thinks the affect achieved is crap, are they not supposed to say that?

 

I don't see venom, ad hominem attacks, etc., in Ron's comments. I'm sorry to say I can't say the same for Marc's post.

I pasted one of Ron Chappel's comments twice, above, by accident.

<p>

" This,like most of your Brown ones,is CRAP "

-- (July 28, 2002) on form...

<p>

Is "CRAP" ok with you ? I mean is that the best word to use ?

<p>

Especially for Emil Schildt's work, but even generally speaking ?

<p>

"Ugly" said Ron Chappel as well... Is that really necessary ?

<p>

"She has the pose of a dried fish." Is that ok too ?

<p>

"extremely amatureish" ? Ok too ?

<p>

Well, I'm sorry, but we obviously don't have the same idea of what's civility. The same ideas can be conveyed in a nicer manner. A little more explanations are not a must, but are always welcome as well, if one feels appropriate to be so harsh.

<p>

I do agree that the scale goes from 1 to 10. Now I'd be curious if anyone can justify a rating of 1 in Aesthetics about Mr Schildt's work, by the way. But let's leave that aside...

<p>

A critique should be intended to express an opinion and justify it, so that it can be useful to others. I see no reason to use such nasty words. Slaming people is an internet privilege, but using it like this is what I call an abuse. Feel free to disagree. Regards.

Ron, it is true that finding a particular image that you recall among 370000+ images is essentially impossible on photo.net. However, your idea that categorization and thumbnails would help with this task is nonsense.

 

There would be at most a few categories, say 20, and assuming the images were evenly distributed among the categories, that would still give you 17500 images per category. If thumbnails were presented at 10 per page, that would leave you to scroll though 1750 pages looking for the image. Is this what you want? The only way the category would help much is if you could also narrow it down in some other way, such as "portraits + in the last two weeks".

 

You could go beyond categories and let people assign one or more keywords. But if there were a few hundred keywords to choose from -- enough so that "sunset" would be one of the choices -- you could still have thousands of thumbnails to review, and this is assuming the person who uploaded the photo you were searching for actually used the keyword.

 

Where categories would be nice would be in finding the highest-rated photos in a category, perhaps in combination with some other criteria. We are hoping to implement that soon, at least for newly uploaded images.

 

Systems for categorizing and indexing photos certainly exist. Stock houses have them, for example. But searching large image databases with an arbitrary query like "All sunsets", without relying on the text in the titles, keywords, etc, is a research topic. And an argument can be made against implementing even the more feasible indexing approach, since it would make photo.net a big "free" stock photo agency, open to anyone looking to steal an image. I don't think that is what most of the people uploading photos to photo.net want.

 

 

As for thumbnails, they are currently used to present the Search results, for folders, and for the various categories (how about that) of critique requests. Where else would you want to be able to use thumbnails?

 

By the way, if you're going to adopt a harsh posture in your posts, it would be better if you were unquestionably right. Then at least people would say, "Well, he's a jerk; but he has a point."