The main gallery

There seem to be fewer and fewer submissions to the main gallery and even fewer people commenting on them? .............. Comments?

been like that for over a year now. I always looked forward to the comments, good or bad, so I post very occasionaly now. Also if they are not good, or bad, enough for a comment I remove mine..

Perhaps we're not bgetting out and about as much since the pandemic struck?

A timely reminder to have a look at our archives and dish up a few that escaped us the first time around?

I've almost stopped uploading images to the main gallery, as hardly anyone seems to look at them. It's not an ego thing, but it seems a little pointless if they aren't viewed or commented on. It's a real shame as it's one of the things that stops me from visiting PentaxUser nowadays.

Regards
David

David, your most recent picture has so far received 35 views, 5 likes and 3 comments.

I think you've just made my point for me John! A few years ago it wasn't unusual to receive over 100 views and 15 or 20 comments. This isn't just an observation on my images, it's general to all images in the gallery. Views and comments are only around a third or less of what they were 4 or 5 years ago.

For me it's just indicative of the lack of time I have at the moment for photography in general. Nothing personal sorry.

Posting pictures to the main gallery has never seriously crossed my mind. What's the point of the gallery when you can start a thread in Your Photos and get comments there? Am I missing something?

If anyone can give a reason for posting to the main gallery that rings a bell for me, I might just consider it.

Steve

I must admit I rarely look at the main gallery, and rarely post there. Even when I do, I don't remember to check if anyone has commented. I look at images in the images thread, but not the gallery as I rarely go to the main page. For the same reason, I rarely see the the picture of the week. (It is a shame there isn't a gallery of pictures of the week so we can look back over all the ones selected.) My browser has a window open on the fora. I post pictures in so many places that I don't really think about the main gallery here. To give you some idea...

Main gallery here: 132 images over 13 years,

Ipernity. My main image hosting site mainly used to post things to other sites such as here (i.e., as most people use Flickr). A real mixture as I use it for any image I want to post elsewhere, not necessarily a good image. (4697 images).

Instagram. Largely photos I like, rarely a more "social media" type image (857 images).

krislockyearphotography.foliopic.com This is supposed to be the showcase of my better images but I don't update it as often as I ought. (194 out of a possible maximum of 500).

US fora. Much like here, images are posted in threads and not in a gallery. I post there a great deal more than here because (a) I like to do the "Single in [enter a month]" challenge where I try to take and post one photo a day with a lens of the month. September was the K35/2, last month the K150/4, this month the F35-70. Also, I can post any of my film images (pinholes, folders, TLRs...) and there are endless light-hearted posting threads (the alphabet game, show your pets etc.). I have no idea how many images are posted there (just as here in the image threads and the gear threads). There are a small number of bad images in the gallery I'd like to delete if I can find out how. All the images are hosted on Ipernity. (One reason for this is that if I decide to take down an image for any reason, I can delete it from Ipernity and it will no longer show on most of the other platforms.)

Other places: a few on the Lomography site, some on the Manual Focus Lenses site, and a few on the Soviet Cameras site (although I haven't been there in an age as they were more interested in collecting cameras with minor differences than taking photos with them).

For the main gallery to have some relevance, it needs to be better integrated with the main forum rather than off on its own. In general, this forum appears to have got quieter and quieter over the years. I see the same couple of dozen people posting regularly, but it doesn't seem nearly as busy as it was when I joined. When did hefty last post, for example? A bit of a revamp would be nice too (although not a Flickresque ungodly mess, please) . For example, the image size worked well when I joined in 2007, but now looks much too small.

Best wishes, Kris.

I've always thought of things like this as simply offering options. We do the same with the various ADAPS website options, offering the forum, facebook, Flikr, YouTube and anything else that looks useful After that, it's up to the members what they like to use and this changes with time. For the first two years, almost nothing happened on our facebook page and then it suddenly erupted into activity and these days is a major part of how we all keep in touch.

Similarly here, there are all sorts of options and the gallery and the forum do overlap, but it depends what we want to use. The gallery pictures will be there indefinitely to look at. The forum thread images will gradually go down the pages and be rarely looked at. If members choose to host those images off-site then shen they stop supporting that they will disappear.

There's also ePHOTOzine, the sister site to this one, and I have around 5000 images on there, one more being added every day.

It's all out there to be grasped and used, so feel free!

Not quite true. I just hit the "go to the beginning" button and (a) it says page 40 whereas it must be many more than that and (b) the links to the photos are all broken, you just get tiny thumbnails. I have scrolled through the many images to see when the links start working again.

K.

I've had a look womble and it's quite interesting. All the very oldest pages come up as page 40, so you're right there are many more than 40. The earliest also only show thumbnails, some very small thumbnails at that, but they are also marked as by "unknown" and date back to about 2002. After a while, there are names allocated in the normal way and from about 2008 onwards the pictures also display properly. Or something like that, I can't vouch for every page as there are too many of them to trawl through.

What I do expect is that the forum threads will have a lot of blank spaces where images used to be and that once we get to about 2008 onwards the gallery will be the reliable collection of our pictures.

Spam?

One does have to be careful posting on sites such as Instagram. They claim it does not take ownership of its users’ content. However their terms state that the user grants them a “non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use their content”.

What this means is that Instagram has all the rights of the original owner of the content – aside from the fact that it is not an exclusive licence. Should a photographer sell an image under an exclusive licence, posting that image on their Instagram would breach that licence.

I've never sold an image yet so I'm probably safe...