[Pudding4brains]

Hi,

I'm starting to feel bad about a high percentage of site structure/organization related posts both here and on WAB, please don't consider it to be "nagging for the purpose of nagging" but I just like to give my opinion while I'm still 'fresh' so as to make clear what 'problems' newbies may run into. Once settled in those things are much harder to identify and one tends to forget they ever were a 'problem'.

This post basically addresses the information provided to new users on what is expected from them, what would be welcome, what not and why.

I'm afraid that in various other posts (mostly on WAB) I've made clear enough that I'm not a huge fan of the (current state of) software used on both sites. I feel the pages are very cluttered, with many "features" I don't need leaving little space for the information that I do wish to read and resulting in much scrolling to even find what buttons to press. I'm only repeating this because this also goes to "providing information". As a newbie, because of the clutter, I find/found it hard to find my way around...

Things might have been a bit extra confused as I didn't quite 'understand' from the start what parts of the "menu structure" at the top are supposed to be context-specific and what not. Various instances of "Home" and "Search", that do different things - that sort of thing. This also means I spend some time with things like first going to "Forums", then "FAQ" and next "Gallery" then "FAQ" ... to find the same FAQ, that doesn't really tell me anything about the Gallery.

Which brings me to the main point of this post - I now believe that some/most of the information I was looking for did not as much get obscured by the "clutter" but more likely just isn't present.

To me as a newbie some of the points below are quite unclear and I didn't easily find comprehensive information on them:

1. What is the exact purpose of the site? Is it all about "sharing", "community", about getting ID's for images, collecting/providing images of all species of the world??
2. Why was this site even created as a "sister" to WAB? What's the point/theory behind splitting things up, not having all images in one joined gallery, all discussion in one forum. I find "British" animals here and foreign animals on WAB? Where am I supposed/requested to post what?
3. What is the purpose of the Galleries in general, and why the split between user and main galleries? What goes where? What sort of images do you even "want" here. Only foreign species? Only high quality "beautiful" images, or do you want to 'document' as many species as possible, even if relatively low quality (if so: why not more structure in the taxonomic info with the images).
4. Possibly related: Why the lower limit on image sizes. To me this can only mean you do not want to "document species" as many images would be refused. Or do you prefer huge images with a tiny indistinguishable creature somewhere in the center. Silly question, I know, but the point is that I cant find any info concerning the purpose of things as they are.
5. Also related: Where do the "Attachments" to the forum fit in? What is their purpose vs the "galleries". And in what ways will these be searchable/retrievable (how is meta info of these handled).
6. Is meta info inside image files (EXIF, JPEG-coments etc) evaluated / searchable at all? Is it considered "good practice for the porpose of WAW, or is it considered unfavourable "extra luggage" both in terms of storage and bandwith?
7. And what's with the "Links" section? What sort of links do you want there? In many screens I find an invitation to "Promote your Wildlife or Environment website." that seems to link there. Okay, so that's the purpose? Or do you want to build an extensive general collection of links to good resources for ID-ing and other interesting info on wildlife related issues? If so, what sort of links are wanted, and what would be considered "SPAM"/"garbage".

Because of these unclarities at the moment I'm a bit reluctant to upload/contribute stuff... really no idea whatsoever what is (un)wanted/expected.

Please, again, note that this is by no means intended as "site bashing" - these are genuine considerations of a newbie that I feel might be of use to the admins to know about.

Also the points raised are genuine questions - what sort of contributions do you want/expect from me. If I've overlooked info already available of course a mere pointer of link will do. If the info is not available and you feel, as I do, that it might be of use to (new) visitors, please consider adding it to the FAQ or an "About" page rather than answering (just) here.

Cheers!
Arp

P.S. Forgot to mention: The "Links" section seems to have 2 items for reptiles and none for insects/invertebrates ...

[StuartDH]

Hi,

Thanks for all the info, it is very difficult trying to get a balance between having most of the featurs found on a forum, but also keeping it simple enough for newbies. I'll try and answering some of the questions, then I'll also add them to the FAQs pages

1. WATW covers all wildlife and environment topics around the world (including the UK), but WAB is just UK

2. WATW and WAB are sister sites in that I setup both of them, but only WAB is a UK charity and we wanted to keep it limited to just British wildlife so the topic didn't become overshadowed by some of the more spectacular foreign wildlife and environment topics etc.

3. The WATW galleries are for all worldwide wildlife and environment images with the best images in the main categories and other images in user galleries.

4. The minimum image sizes were put in because of the ever-growing size of monitors and 10+ megapixel cameras. The old 640x480 size was common on sites 5 years ago, but they only fill a quarter of those most common monitors

5. Attachments should have been switched off because they're not easily searchable. Images should be uploaded to the gallery and linked in the forum using the code under the images

6. EXIF has been kept in the images, but you're right about it being extra luggage, the database tables are massive (nearly 1GB in WAB) so we'll probably remove most of them

7. The links section is just our way of keeping together sites that link back to us and give the chance for them to tell others about their site. All wildlife/environment/outdoor activity sites can submit a link


Essentially, WATW is a place to find out more about the natural world around the world. Post info and questions and talk to people about wildlife and the environment across the planet.

Stu

[Pudding4brains]

Hi Stuart,

Thanks for the answer. I've found the Gallery Info on WAB by now and realized I shouldn't have uploaded there as I have no images of British wildlife (yet).

I'm still a bit unsure about the images here though. Both images I have used in my forum posts so far are low quality, small images. One is even a diagram, not a "photo" (or snapshot rather). I feel both serve fine for the purpose of discussion on the forum, but both would be refused for the gallery (even the user gallery).

If attachments "should have been disabled" then where should these have gone? Or would it be preferred not to use such (low quality) images and/or diagrams at all? A bit related: I'm used to making images so small/narrow that they will nicely display in forum threads directly (not as thumb) and without making the forum a pain to read (due to stretching the width of the page to the image width. I do this because I feel it's wise to save experts who might spend their good time on an ID for me an extra click/window/wait and with maybe 40-80K a few images per thread don't usually make the page load too cumbersome anyway. What's the WATW policy/feelings about this - rather use the thumbs and large gallery images anyway?

Also, as the diagram is "for discussion" and may well be erroneous I would have felt that it was a bad idea to upload it to the galleries anyway as I perceive "galleries" to be "demonstrations" of stuff that is "okay".... ??

Many of my images are "best viewed" at resolutions below 640x480 as I often deal with small critters and my camera is a just a 4Mpix "toy" - hence my doubts about contributing. I do however have quite a few images of species/larva etc that are not 'represented' at all on the web (or only very scarcely). Hence my questions about "documenting species" as opposed to "beautiful images".

For now I'm lead to believe that WATW is then more about "nice images" than "documenting species" (also because of the missing/rudimentary structure for taxonomic info) - so I'm a bit reluctant to make bigger crops (also because of the work involved) or bigger collages just to make the images 'acceptable' if that is not the intention of the site.

Okay, I'll leave it that for now, 'nough said, hope my unsorted mumbling conveys my 'dilemmas' somewhat nevertheless.

Thanks for any further thoughts/explanations!
Arp

P.S. Discussed images here and here.

[StuartDH]

Keeping WAB separate from here, images in the WATW gallery aren't moderated. Simply post good pics in the gallery sections and anything else in the member gallery, although I've just added a new 'Other Images' category where you can't post diagrams, non-wildlife/environment images etc

All images should go in the gallery and be linked in the forum by the thumbnail code under the image. 40-80k is fine for broadband, but we've still got lots of dial-up users as this is a worldwide site and there are also increasing mobile phone users that would find 40-80k images a slow load. The thumbnails in the threads are about 3 or 4k

We've always found that images are better viewed larger than 640x480 and had a lot of complaints in the early days that these smaller images didn't show enough detail to be useful.

I think if we went into taxonomic posting of images too much then it would put off too many people who don't know where their image of a caterpillar, fox etc should go. On WAB we foiund it best if all images go into the major groups first, and then with enough images in there we can start to split them up into smaller groups over time.

[Pudding4brains]

Hi Stu,

Just checking once more to make sure. I seem to remember a general request to the community here to upload many many images (can't seem to find it now though, so maybe I'm confused?)

Well, I have a relatively large batch of fairly/really small images that are ready cropped and optimized for forum/internet usage as they show mostly the animal and not much else around it. My camera isn't the best available (to say the least) so the best my camera can do with small animals is such as displayed in the attachments to this post.

These images, as they are, I have sitting around on my hdd. If I would have to make them a 640x480 minimum I would have to go back and redo the cropping (if I still have the larger originals that is), which means extra work and really doesn't make the animal one bit sharper or clearer ("blowing them up" to the required size would even be worse in terms of sharpness). In fact, the little 3mm ant woodlouse would get lost in a sea of red underground.

So, should I forget about these images that document many species and their development stages? Of course I also have some "nice to look at" of big flowers with a small unrecognizable bug or bee somewhere in the center and I'll be happy to share those, but it's not my main focus in "photography".

Sometimes I have collages of these animals, and some of those might qualify for upload by sheer pixelsize, as these will consist of multiple small images, just for the sake of argument I uploaded one to the (user) gallery:


Although the complete image is accepted at upload, the individual parts wouldn't be - so it's fair to assume that the "detail" provided is then actually not "up to standard" for the gallery either. So, would collages like that be welcome anyway or would you rather not have them because of the inferior quality?

Hope these examples illustrate the point/question I was asking answers to.

Cheers
Arp
P.S. Oh - I see attachments are indeed disabled now, so I can't even attach the small images I was talking about ... well, that clears that up

Here they are. The boxes indicate what I had sitting around. The ant woodlouse is now pasted into a background from some other image, the ladybird larva is a newly created crop (old size boxed). The larger pixel size adds nothing to the "quality" of the image. Original filesizes were 10k and 20k, now 50k and 40k respectively.

[Pudding4brains]

The larva in the post above is of relatively good quality (it's also about a full centimeter in size). Many of my images are smaller animals, and some are taken at night under bad artificial light conditions. A better/fairer illustration of collage quality would be these two. My camera would be hard pressed to produce better images, but the species can be recognized.

A 2mm adult Pygmy Woodlouse:


A 3mm baby Common Striped Woodlouse (I think this is your vernacular name) running about, hence unsharp, but clear enough to identify and/or convey an idea what a toddler of this species would look like:


Do's or Don'ts?
Arp

[Pudding4brains]

Okay, because of the comments with this upload, I'll kick this thread up to see if I can still get an answer...

With the images in the posts above I still feel I'm somehow "cheating the system" by making larger-than-necessary crops and/or collages of multiple low-res images, just to get them 'accepted' at upload. It's true I have been uploading more stuff in the time these open questions have been lingering here, but I've also constantly felt a bit "bad" about many of my uploads

More or less related is the "cheating" that I do here as a work-around for illustrating things on WAB: Bluntly put, I've been uploading some stuff here as a substitute "foreign image repository" for WAB to show some details/situations related to threads on the WAB-forum.

To me that seemed a "fair workaround" as WAB-policy asks me to not upload foreign stuff and not embed images from external (image)servers. Using WATW as "external image server" seemed the 'best' I could do (apart from giving up on posting images on WAB altogether), but of course it's not really what WATW is all about either.

Having "confessed" all that, of course I realize that I'm a guest here and that I'm constantly "cheating" the host's policies, so it would probably be best to clear things up, either by getting a clear "don't worry" or by a clear "please don't"??

[paul m]

Obviously only Stuart can answer this but I think you're worrying too much as well as being overly self-critical.

I've had problems on WAB where a lot of the people are (a) very keen photographers and/or (b) bird people. To be honest I often don't know what they're talking about or what are their criteria for 'suitable' pictures. Reciprocally many of them don't understand why I like pictures of invertebrates, plants etc which are detailed and accurate rather than pretty pictures.

So I limit myself to invertebrate pictures. If one can't see any details or if the picture is badly out of focus then clearly there's no great value in putting it in the gallery. However, sometimes things are so distinctive that even a less than perfect photograph is adequate. For instance I uploaded this picture:

despite its inadequacies because it was better than nothing. If the gallery were overloaded with pictures of bombardier beetles then it would be worth culling some of them.

As you say a few of your woodlouse pictures are not great but in the sequences you prepare the poorly focused ones are useful in giving an idea of size and shape if not detail. And I do think that they are very useful and interesting exhibits.

If it were I, I would put them in the insect-invertebrate gallery and link them to the forum. I hope Stuart will agree.

[Pudding4brains]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your thoughts on the matter

Originally Posted by paul m

... many of them don't understand why I like pictures of invertebrates ... which are detailed and accurate <...> I uploaded this picture .... despite its inadequacies because it was better than nothing.

Well, it would seem you and I have very similar attitudes toward 'valuing' images

As it is, I don't feel very guilty about my uploads to WATW, but I do (constantly) realize it goes against policies and/or intended use so it would be nice to know to what extend my "abuse" of the sites is rubbing "the forces that be" the wrong way...