Uploading Images

just go with if you dont like it well dont do it.

I can speak Simian. He is saying 'let them get away with it, don't upload images if you see it as profiteering.'

I'd second this idea but you'd have to match each image so that Tom could tell it was a duplicate, which may be a long process seeing as some actresses over over 20 pages of images.

I know some of the pictures that I have posted are bringing this issue up and would like to say that I would be for some kind a duplication moderating.
I do try to not post duplicates and if I do is because I found a bigger and better quality pictures and try not to post too many "red carpet" shots. Believe me when I say that if I wanted to game the points system I could do a lot better.

well, if you go by the existent policies almost all pictures should be deleted, because:

"Upload public domain images only."

as you can see on Wikipedia freely available (aka public domain) pictures of anything are as scarce as ice in the Sahara...

but i share your opinion, at least the ugly pictures with websitenames across them should be delete- or reportable in some way.

also i like the idea of some pull-down-menu to switch the pictures overview from 20 pictures at once until at least 100 at once (like in the media items overview), so duplicates would less likely be uploaded.

duplicates are quite rare, occur usually by mistake, or by someone uploading a duplicate (but higher resolution version) of same image.

What chaffs me though is all those images with logos watermarked across the centre of the picture.

Instead of 20 or 100 or whatever thumb display, anyway to make the picture galleries more of a Google Picasa feel to it?

what is Google Picasa and what benefit should its display of pictures have in here?

Its both an offline and online photo album manager. The online version has a nice slider where you can dynamically resize thumbnails, therefore fit a lot more on one screen. And when you expand an image, you can go back or forth thru rest, without having to return to thumbnail view.

The offline version has a lot more zing to it, such as scrollable images, drag 'n' drop re-order, and zoom on fly-over.

ok, i see, but it sounds like it would be quite complex to implent (if it would be even legal with all the crazy US-patents floating around, making even breathing bloody patended). maybe some categorizing would help in discovering duplicates too, but that's another story.

are moderators able to delete pictures? i know this was discussed ages ago, but i forgot what the last verdict on this (if there was any) was.

we used to long time ago, but it was taken out and never returned.

It would be nice to have:

a) a few more moderators

b) ability to delete blatantly bad images / incorrect images

I nominate the swiss team: Coroner and Bael ;)

hm, another image-related thing that bugged me for a long while:

it's really no good to upload a better (aka higher resolution) image when Listal cuts it automatically to a maximum size, so it ends up being just a little bigger than the lower quality image. some kind of "enlarge image" would be nifty. on the other hand i think Tom limited it on purpose so the server doesn't get clogged with 2000x2000 px images ;) (i wonder where he gets the massive webspace used for Listal anyway).

Probably from heaven, there must be loads of room up there these days. ;)

so this explains Tom's avatar. it's his home: paradise! :D

Following up on Bael point - What is the policy on images?! What's the rule of thumb, if its widely available on the web its ok to use? If its an autograph, its ok?! I've only uploaded images from Wiki so far, but I've seen a lot of images on here from magazine and know they aren't public domain. Would love to update some images, but need guidance first.

Rule of Thumb is its just a disclaimer to cover his own butt, but unless you're a major site like wikipedia or gaming or movie sites, the copyright police won't touch you. Besides, if one were to follow Youtube's lead, as long as its user-uploaded content, copyright police can only issue warning, and then YouTube removes the copyrighted video. i.e. its not a big deal.

When it comes to box art, screenshots, movie posters, even though many websites throw their own watermarks on the items, they can all be used fairly, as my understanding is they fall into fair-use category, as they relate to promotion of the copyrighted work. This also applies to band photos they distribute for promotions. Paparazzi and Magazine shots of celebrities, that falls into a 'grey area'.

@Grand Assault: hm, that's strange. when i make a test with big images they just get cropped without being clickable (IE7, Firefox 3). do you have a working one for reference?

sure, it doesn't seem really fair, but when you have a 800x500 image at hand, and one uploaded the same image in grainy 200x100 it just makes me mad (because i hate duplicates too) ;).

thank you. are you doing something special? because i uploaded a picture (original size 1392 x 1000) two times in my personal pictures under bael.listal.com/viewimages once per web location, once per file upload. both times not clickable. your pictures work fine though. very strange. nonetheless the enlarged pictures could be handled better. maybe without destroying the site layout...

It's gotta be pretty hard for Tom to manage all the picutres that are uploaded daily. Uploading pictures is my biggest hobbie here on listal, and every time I post for artists that have too many photos I go through every page to make sure it's not repeated. It's a shame not everyone takes the time to do it. Surely most of the duplicates are by mistake or because of quality issues, but I strongly think the profile points have a higher say in this.

By the way, silly question: when a picture is reported can the uploader see who did it?

No they can't.

I'm thinking of writing a function to compare the similarity of a image when uploaded, if this can be done fast enough I think this will be the ultimate solution to this problem. Also considering adding an option to view all images on one page.

thank you. are you doing something special? because i uploaded a picture (original size 1392 x 1000) two times in my personal pictures under bael.listal.com/viewimages once per web location, once per file upload. both times not clickable. your pictures work fine though. very strange. nonetheless the enlarged pictures could be handled better. maybe without destroying the site layout...

It's not available for personal images yet, mainly because I wasn't sure people would want their images being accessible at high resolutions, I was planning on adding an option for this.

By the way, silly question: when a picture is reported can the uploader see who did it?

No

I was thinking that repeating images should be okay if the existing image is way too small or its quality is very poor. But what is the policy if the first image is already in a good size? I mean, there is no need for gigantic images, right? Or do you guys think the larger the better? The reason I ask is because while I was looking through Angelina Jolie's pictures, I noticed that someone re-uploaded a image that in my opinion was already in a good size.

example 1 vs example 2 / example 3 vs example 4

Just curious as what to do in this case.

I usually go trough all pages also, to make sure the picture I want to upload isn't already there. But, when my picture have a better quality, I upload it and leave a comment in the repeated image, telling them I've uploaded a better one. If someone did this to me, I'd delete my image, but I'm not sure how people act when I do this.

But I honestly think the bigger, the better. I started uploading pictures to Listal to make it easier for me to find them without saving in my computer. It is normal for me to take a picture and edit it in photoshop for some random end. And, thinking for this, sometimes you really need the big image.

And I think there should be a minimum size for uploading images. There are some that are just too small. They don't even fit for being the primary image, c'mon.

What exactly is the policy on pictures with those big watermarks in the middle?
I know Tom said that they fall into the 'fair-use' category but it's so much nicer to see a page full of clean, nice looking images.. It seems to me that watermarked images are only for spam, acumulating points and all.. Couldn't it be forbidden or something?

i think people that upload don't do it for points, but more for prestige. I mean we all bow before Coroner for his uber-high quality images he's uploaded, along with all the various movie posters in all languages. He's done the site great service. So on the flip side, if someone keeps uploading images with ugly watermarks across, or low-rez duplicates, or 500 scenes of same paparazzi image, we, as a community, should mock them or ask them to stop. It doesnt win any favors in my books if someone habitually does it.

Maybe we can organize listal clean-up, and target certain actor/actress pictures that have lots of duplicates, and send a half dozen "please delete this" comments on all poor quality or dupes, and the person who uploaded it will get bombarded with all those comments that we'll convince them to delete the photo.

I think it would be nice. Because I've seen times where the person would upload a repeated image, someone would tell them in comments, show the link of the first one, and the person who uploaded it would just say "I don't listen to hypocrites"

I reported many watermarked images this morning but I gave up when I realized I was probably going to drive Tom crazy.

Organizing a clean-up would be much nicer. We can start commenting and asking the uploaders to remove those images and report only those who refuse!

What about magazine covers? It's almost the same problem, it has so much stuff written in it that sometimes it's hard to even see the photograph! Would that be included in our clean-up?

I think that some magazine covers should be erased, but not for this reason.. But because in most of the times there's the picture from the cover without all the stuff. But I think it's okay to keep the ones that doesn't have the clean picture.

I agree watermarked images are not needed if there are already a lot of normal pictures, I think magazine covers can be interesting if there are not too many of them.

I would like to appoint moderators to remove some of these images (at the moment moderators can't remove images)

I'm making a list of images I belive to be irrelevant to Listal, and I'll send messages to the users asking them to read this topic and remove the images. I am also re-thinking my own uploads and have deleted some images as well.

I think having people to help delete and keep an eye on images upload would make things a lot easier around here!

If the person who uploaded refuses to delete it, just report it and Tom will take care of it. The clean-up is just to make thinkgs easier while moderators can't delete images...

But of course many people don't have the time or the patience to do this and they have the right to upload pictures, so you can't make them check the pictures to see if the one they will upload is already there.

It's a matter of common sense. If someone doesn't have the time or patience to check the images beforehand, they shouldn't upload it just yet... Uploading images shouldn't be just for earning points. We should all work together to make this a clean, pleasant website, and these are very simple rules to follow.

but how could we help them? I mean, how can we tell the moderators about duplicates and giant watermarks?

There is a report button on the top of every image page.

Would it be better if people only got 10 points if there weren't any other pictures for that film/person/album already? Maybe 1 point for each additional image? Or if getting 10 points per image is causing people to upload pointless images then just remove all image points (that will be controversial!) - and possibly give more points for votes received to compensate?

What about capping how many images one can upload per database entry? Is something like 30 images fair? And if someone has more, they need to be selective and only upload 30 of their best images. It also gives new users a fair chance to upload images not in database yet, rather than other members uploading 200+ pics of their favorite celeb, including a dozen poses of same shot, just slightly different angle.

30 seems generous! So you could upload 30 pictures of Johnny Depp and I could upload another 30? (Not that either of us would!)

I can't see any reason anyone would want to upload more than 30 images of someone. I think I'd get bored way before that!

I'm thinking coroner and his dozens of international posters, and dozens of incredible high quality images of stars when I put in 30 limit. Or may for him, make it 50. :)

Or we can make the voting decide the outcome. Limit of only 5 images that can be uploaded, and each time you get a vote for one of them, you can upload another image. But only for actors/actresses/musicians. A 5 image limit wouldnt be good for uploaders of game screenshots, box art, movie posters, etc...

and you would be able to keep uploading that goddess, coz I keep voting for all her pictures :)

see, the system would work

I don't think it would be fair either. Some people are actually doing good here now.. I'm thinking maybe limiting the users who don't follow the rules would work better.. I say this because all the images I've reported so far are basically from the same uploader. I mean, if a person only uploads images that go against all the rules and all that we've discussed here, and even after being talked to refuses to cooperatebe, then he/she should be the one "grounded", not everyone else!
I mean, at least it would make people think twice before breaking the rules.

It really wouldn't be fair! I'm the kind of person who is always looking for pictures of different people, even when I didn't know Listal. And back then, I used to save all the images in my computer, 'cause I usually use them. Of course, my computer's memory isn't that big. So, now, I look at those pictures and upload them at Listal at the same time. I'm increasing the site and making my computer's life easier. And, when I sit down to upload someone's images, I easilly go to the 200+. Not for the points, but for my pleasure of being able to easilly have the pictures and to let other people see them easily too.
I make a list of the pictures in the site, and, after all, this is the meaning of the site, right?

And, even when I was basically the only person who uploaded images for a certainly person, I go trough the whole thing to make sure it isn't a repost. Yesterday, I looked over 50 pages. When I miss some picture and someone tells me, I delete it, no big deal.

Limiting everyone really, really wouldn't be fair.

Maybe there could be a punishment for someone who doesn't delete the image after being told, like, spending a week without doing anything that gives them points at the site or something like that.