No, it wasn't me. The last time this happened it was because of an unusual symbol in the post title that confused the search system.

The best program to use is Pictures to Exe, which can be downloaded for a modest fee that includes a lifetime of free upgrades.

There is no point using large files as the screen will only show a 1024x768 image at 72ppi. Best therefore to use this size as the video card does not need to resample it.

For P2E prsentations the files should be JPEGs.

A friend's son inherited a camera taking SmartMedia cards and had the same problem. Eventually I found someone selling a camera that had 6 cards with it, four of them being 128MB. This only cost me £20 for the package, so it's worth keeping your eyes open.

That's exactly the sort of old lens I was thinking of.

They are successful in relation to the level of activity on the forum. Sometimes when I get here in the evening there are maybe ten new threads of images, so if you look at that as a proportion of how many people are around the forum then that's pretty good.

The maximum number of people online ever was 121 I think, at one time that is, so 40 is also excellent.

The figures are here on the site available for all to see. Nowhere near the over 6000 registered members actively post so I think you should measure success from the number who participate. The rest are maybe just content to watch.

Funnily enough I was thinking of older Voigtlander lenses when I started reading through this thread. Some of them have an incredible number of blades, far in excess of what we expect these days. They were good lenses.

The bokeh on the Canon shot was horrible.

I would guess that having seen how successful the competition and Your Photos threads were they were trying to enhance the experience.

Now we will have the best of both worlds - the Competition Gallery seems to be tidying up as we speak. It even looks neater now the titles of the competitions are properly formatted.

Don't worry about being at odds with anyone, we're all quite tame really. On a good day anyway...

Only that the SMC Pentax-DA 12-24mm is probably a better lens, albeit it more expensive and not as wide.

I think that's a good way to do it Terry. You'll get an instant response here and if it's a good shot it can always go to the gallery later, at a proper size perhaps so it can be also considered for the magazine.

It is possible to post directly into forums, but most foums have this switched off as it causes bandwidth issues. Many block linking to outside sites for the same reason.

The problem will always be getting an integration of website and forum, because the two things have different purposes and users often only use one or the other. I hardly ever visit the forums at EPZ, for example, but I always look at the galleries. Here it tends to be the other way round.