mhahn

How do you download photos from your galleries, or is it no longer possible to do this? I think there used to be a download icon next to each picture, but I don't see it anymore.

 

Thanks in advance if you can help.

 

Martin

It was a grab shot, for sure. I was sitting next to the window, Jackson jumped onto the sill and I quickly tried to try to get a few pictures with my phone, a Google Pixel 3a, before he moved away. Thank you for all the comments. Martin

I love the way my cat's (Jackson's) body is positioned in this pic, but maybe the fact that you can't see his eyes is a negative.

Is this now limited to paying members?

Do you live in the Washington, DC, area?

 

If you do, you should check out Artomatic 2017, at 1800 South Bell Street in Crystal City (near the Metro). It's open every day of the week except Monday and Tuesday through May 6.

 

No self-promotion here (ha ha), but I have a wall of photographs (of Georgetown Waterfront Park) on the 8th floor (room 8416).

 

Anyway, Artomatic can be a lot of fun. There are only five or six hundred participants in all, so you're likely to see something that interests you!

 

http://www.artomatic.org/

The big camera stores, the independent camera stores, the professional B&W and color labs, and the one-hour mini lab chains. It's sad to see them go. The other day, I put it in an order for a couple of small prints from my local Ritz (I just happen to live near one), and I had the option of picking them up from the nearby location (about 2 miles away) or the one other store that's left in the chain (about 1,800 miles away). I used to be able to send an order to a store 2 or 3 blocks from where I worked and pick it up an hour later. And the people there knew me, and I knew them, and they would take the time to print to my liking. No more . . . Just had a lot of prints made by Adorama.pix, and the quality is tremendous, but of course it's not as much as fun as it was going to my local Ritz.

I've pretty much given up on Photo Net. Any negative criticism anyone has of the site, I agree with. And why should you have Karl's support, Glenn, when in his estimation the site he once liked has been ruined? It 's not as though "bug fixes" are likely to restore it to anywhere near what he used to like.

These are pictures which I think are reasonably sharp, and I'm not talking about correcting localized areas. It's just that the 5x7's look a little soft, like they need a little special sauce of sharpening, or a slight boost in contrast, or to be printed on a difference surface. I'm not really sure.

I wonder if using an older film camera lens is contributing to a little softness in some of the pictures I'm working with. Or maybe because I added some (too much?) noise reduction. Or maybe I just need to increase the contrast a little bit. These are pictures that look fine printed in color on 81/2x11 office copy paper, but tend to look a little soft in the Adoramapix 5x7's.

 

I actually tried to download Pixel Genius software yesterday, but for some reason it didn't show up in my Photoshop.

 

And adding 60/4 UM, which looked good on screen . . . I don't think that's the answer.

How would the print quality from the Canon PIXMA PRO-100 compare to the print quality from a decent online printer (Adorama.pix, for instance)? I used to do B&W darkroom printing, but have never done my own printing from a digital camera.

Add an additional 60 (amount) at a radius of 4 looks about right. Takes away the sharpness without adding jaggy edges when looking at images at 50 percent.

Photos I've taken with a Nikon d5200, but mostly with an older E series 100 (105?) mm lens look sharpened to about the right amount on my monitor (it's a pretty ordinary monitor), but most of the 5x7's I've had printed at Adoramapix (on glossy paper) look a little soft. The pictures I like I want enlarge to 8 1/2 by 11 or 11 x 14, in some cases.

 

So I do I need to add more sharpening? Do I add enough so that the photos actually look oversharpened on my monitor?

 

I edit my pictures in Photoshop, which comes with Lightroom, which I never use.

 

Thanks in advance for any advice anyone might offer.

 

Martin

I need to first note that the issue isn’t whether the old system worked for the people who used it—it clearly did, or they wouldn’t have used it. The issue, instead, is how to make it work for a broader group of people, including those who didn’t use the old system because of perceived problems with fairness or meaningfulness. I’m not saying that the old system was unfair or not meaningful, but I am saying that its structure could make it appear to be for those looking at it from outside, and that would have been a huge disincentive for participation.<br><br>

 

I found Bill C’s point about comparisons to be really good, and it got me thinking. So here’s this for a trial balloon:<br><br>

 

Overview: A user can submit two photos per week for rating. Those photos become anonymous and go into the rating bin. At the end of the week, each rating team member has a week to submit ratings for the photos in the previous week’s bin.<br><br>

 

The rating team: The team is made up of a panel of 4 members, each serving for a month, and each with a start date offset by a week (so every week there’s one new rater and three raters from the previous week). Raters are selected from a pool of vetted members (probably the easiest way of assembling the pool would be to identify members with high “helpful critique” scores from the previous site—that would also have the advantage of selecting raters who don’t necessarily submit photos for ratings themselves). Raters who are on duty for the month would not be eligible to submit photos for rating during the month. <br><br>

 

The process: to a rater, the bin of submitted photos would look like a portfolio, and each rater would be working with their own copy of the portfolio. Each rater would separate the photos into 5 galleries, separating out the stand-outs into gallery 5, the ones that miss into gallery 1, the ones that stand out among the remainder into gallery 4, and the ones in that are on the low end of the remaining group into gallery 2. The remainder go into gallery 3. For galleries 1 and 5, the rater would provide feedback via comments to explain what worked or what needs attention. There would also be an option to provide assessments of technical quality, innovativeness, or whatever, but the overall score from the rater would be on the basis of the overall impression—which gallery the rater assigned the photo to. For each photo, the four raters’ scores would be averaged, and comments would be attached to the rated photo.<br><br>

 

Quality control and assurance: the page moderator could occasionally add some previously rated photos to the bin for the week in order to check for consistency.<br><br>

 

Vetting new raters: users who volunteer to be raters would serve as “apprentices” for a month—they would go ahead and rate as though they were official, and their scores would be compared to those of the official raters. At the end of the period—if their scores were reasonably consistent with the official scores—they would be added to the pool of vetted raters.

Way too complicated. If people weren't using it enough, it's probably because it wasn't enough fun. This sounds like even less fun (not to knock a very well-thought-out system, but it's just not what I would find appealing).

The PN administration purports to be concerned about the fairness of the ratings system, yet they deleted all of our old ratings without warning? Hey, what if we liked having those ratings?

Can all of the camera setting information be restored? For some pictures, I had put the file number in with that information, and now I can't quickly match some of my pictures in my Photo Net galleries with the pictures in my computer files (which are organized by their file number).

 

I mean, yes, I can match them up if I have to, but for cripe sake, what kind of website deletes your information without giving you some advance warning? Why should I have to be expending any effort on doing this?

Just checked whether the gallery sort had been straightened out. But no . . . every time I clicked on a picture, the rest of the gallery re-sorted. Makes it impossible to search through a big gallery. So, gone are the parts of Photo Net that I found fun and the parts of it that made it a decent organizational tool are still thoroughly messed up.

Why can't you update and reboot but retain the part of Photo Net that I enjoyed: posting pictures for ratings and critique and seeing them (my pictures!) for a few minutes on the Photo Net home page? Unless it's a "me" centered fantasy, I don't really see the point of Photo Net. Advice, reviews, etc., you can get in so many places.

To me this is a reboot. I would agree - photo.net needed an update 10 years ago (how could i not!)....but it didn't get one, the parent company didn't want to invest in it until recently and even then we had to go through some bad developers to make traction. Trust me, getting this far wasn't easy. Photo.net was one of the first in its space (online photography community), but slow (an understatement) to adapt and change with the times - fully agreed.

 

 

Is an upgrade in photo presentation and an upgrade in forum functionality (IMHO) and streamlined navigation on a site that is now largely responsive moving in the right direction? - I think so, and so do many others. Many that are in the negative camp, only wanted 1.0 to "stay as it was " because it was familiar to them but in the next breath wanted change. More and more people treated it kind of like driving their classic car - they'd do it on Sundays, maybe, if the mood struck them, but the traffic trends showed that people were relying on it less and less for dependable community. Now over those 10 years since we "needed a redesign"- the space blew up, so there were many other shiny sites to explore. Wants and needs change in time - nothing is static with the internet (well very little - photo.net v1 was a rare case).

 

The analogy made in the first few exchanges this thread was accurate - then the conversation seems to quickly veer into bug talk towards the middle and end - many of the bugs have already been address and organized in other threads but you will get the point.

 

In short, we moved from a technological antique in v1 - into something that can be supported by programmers and developers of todays skill set. It wasn't easy and we're not done yet - I believe this is a never ending journey and there is a reason why they call it a "pursuit of perfection" - its because it is never attained. We appreciate your support.

 

BTW - check out the lightbox within galleries - lower right hand side < > arrows for navigation within galleries.

 

Good Read for developers today: "shipping beats perfection" - by Ben Kamens VP of Engineering at Khan Academy

I respectfully disagree - 10 navigation tabs in v1 have been streamlined to 4 in v2 - new members are joining at a faster rate than I can remember, and I am getting comments about how much people l appreciate how much easier it is to navigate. Yes - it takes some getting used to but its not dysfunctional.

Am I wrong about the picture order changing every time I click on a picture in a gallery?

Just the basic naviagation through a gallery is so dysfunctional . . . . if you click on a picture to take a look at it, the order of the other pictures in the gallery changes . . . after scrolling through a certain number of pictures (not that many), you get a "load more" icon, leaving you with very little idea how many more pictures are in the gallery . . . PhotoNet is just completely dysfunctional at this point.

If the order of the pictures in my galleries can't be restored to how it was before "the change" (and maybe it can be), it should at least be possible to make the order stop changing! I find a picture in one of my galleries that I want to look at it, so I click on it, then when I click on the "back" button to go back to the gallery view and continue searching for other pictures, I find that the order of the rest of the pictures has changed. How can I do an organized search through a gallery when every time I look at one picture the order of the others changes? C'mon!

What happened to the order of the pictures in my galleries? Will that be restored to the way it had been? Also, the order seems to change. I have a couple of galleries with a lot of pictures, and it's so frustrating to find a particular picture now that I just give up, and pretty quickly. It's very frustrating.

That is different. Thanks!