Upgraded image reporting

I've upgraded the system for reporting images. You can now report without leaving the image page and add the exact url for a duplicate image. This will make it much easier for me to remove bad images.

I will be going through the backlog of reported images tomorrow.

The current text: "Please enter the url of the duplicate image (this is the one to be kept)" is a little ambiguous. My initial reaction is that the url I enter will be the one that will be kept but then I think "this is the one to be kept" could be viewed as separate statement with "this" referring to the image on the current page. How about either "Please enter the url of the duplicate image you would like to have removed:" or "Please enter the url of the duplicate image you would like to replace this one with:"

Also, what about the situation where the images are not exact duplicates but minor variants of each other, perhaps movie posters with the same image but different text on them due to being used in different countries. movieposterdb.com handles this by grouping them and using one thumbnail but putting text like "7 versions" under it. Maybe there could be a separate Report category for "Request to be grouped."

Finally, will only exact duplicates be removed, or if someone posts a bigger version of the same image, will the smaller image be removed? If so, hopefully the member who posted the smaller image will get a notice in their update feed because they may be interested in seeing/saving it.

How about either "Please enter the url of the duplicate image you would like to have removed:" or "Please enter the url of the duplicate image you would like to replace this one with:"

Both of these examples are wrong there is no replacing of images but I've updated the wording to be a single sentence, also the confirmation page after that makes it pretty clear.

grouping them and using one thumbnail but putting text like "7 versions" under it.

One thing I don't like about this is having it click twice, I could see this working being able to attach variations to an existing poster but seems like quite a lot of work to manage it.

Finally, will only exact duplicates be removed, or if someone posts a bigger version of the same image, will the smaller image be removed?

Not sure what to do in the situation yet, at the moment I am keeping both images.

Most image-management programs I've tried have a feature for detecting duplicate images, so, for exact duplicates, it seems like you could eventually automate that so there wouldn't be any need for members to report them or for you to manually verify such reports. Running such a program to compare an image against listal's entire catalog might tax the server, but doing it for what's usually less than 1000 images for each item might be feasible. It wouldn't need to alert members of the duplication as soon as they uploaded the image; they could just get a message later when the server had time to run the comparison.

For similar (non-duplicate) images there are programs like d'peg that will detect them, but they're computationally intensive and require a human to check their results, so its probably better to leave it to members to find them. Some image-oriented sites have a parent-child system and give members the ability to vote for one image to be the parent and others to be children of it. Children could be the same image with different text or cropped differently or the same set of publicity photos combined in a different way for a poster. And there could be tags for the child images that would make sense in the context of knowing they were children.

One thing I don't like about this is having it click twice

I agree, and the parent thumbnail should link to a page with a full-size image, but somewhere else on that page there could be a 'The following images have been marked children/related:", and then thumbnails of them displayed. Text like "7 versions" on the Explore Images section is not essential--it just might be helpful to keep members in avoiding uploading duplicates or in finding other versions they were looking for.

Not sure what to do in the situation yet, at the moment I am keeping both images.

If it was the exact same image, only at a smaller size, it could be treated as I described above except it could be hidden by default with some text like 'Marked as being only a smaller size. Show anyway?' similar to how in the forum there's the 'undelete' link for comments that have been marked as not contributing to the discussion.

I went to report these two images

www.listal.com/viewimage/1101220
www.listal.com/viewimage/553999h

as duplicates, but in the comparison box the 'To Delete' image has Dimensions: 1530x2300 and the 'To Keep' image has Dimensions: 939x1413. In Firefox, though, when I go to 'View Image Info,' their dimensions are both listed as 939x1413 and look the same when viewed on their own using 'View Image,' except for a slight horizontal stretching.

1. This seems like it would deter members from finishing the report. I'm guessing the images differed in size only before they were automatically shrunk by listal to be the same.
2. Are you keeping the images that members upload at their original size somewhere? If so, will these ever be accessible?

1. Yes that's the original size.

2. Yes all the original files are stored unaltered, might be made accessible as a pro/vip feature (if the vip membership returns).