Do's & Don'ts of the Photo Gallery

Otto · #1 (**permalink**) November 21st, 2008, 10:31 AM

The Photo Gallery here on the WWII Forums has been a great success. Since it was launched in April, we have had over 1,600 images uploaded, with more coming every day. I must admit I never thought it would take off so well, or that so many different Rogues would immediately take to using this feature.

As good as it is, there are some things we can all do to make the Gallery even better. I'm going to cover some of the main things we can do to change our Gallery feature into a valuable image resource rather than a standard picture post.

Titles
Always, always, always title your photos, and always try to be brief but descriptive. Even if you name your images with brief or short names this is better than the file name as a title.

Dates
The date of the photo is critical! A photo is a good resource on it's own but it becomes a great resource when we know when it was taken. Try your best to supply as much details as possible in this area. Remember our date convention which is as follows: YYYY-MM-DD

If you do not know the date or the month, or aren't sure of the exact date, then supply as much info as you can. Here are some examples of good date info despite some missing data:

2005-10-??
1999-??-??
1975 (circa)

Keywords
Keywords are the most underrated feature of the gallery. Always try to supply one or two content keywords for your image, this will group your images with other similar images based on subject matter. If you aren't sure how do do this effectively, take a look at others who have used keywords. Take time to look at some basic acronyms that will make this task much easier for you. It's likely someone has already simplified your subject into a shortened version, for example, "CoD:UO" is used in place of "Call of Duty: United Offensive" This provides one keyword as opposed to five different ones. DO NOT USE COMMAS.

Despriptions
For God's sake take a second to describe your image, the more details the better. Why upload a photo and leave it without details?

Some Closing (and somewhat harsh) Reminders
Remember, each image you upload counts as a post, so make them count. Just like any contribution to the WWII Forums, if you make post/upload an image and it lacks significant value, it will be removed. Over the next couple months, I will be reviewing and restructuring the Gallery to improve the content there, images that don't meet the above requirements will be deleted.

Parting (Parthian) Shot: WWII-era photos vs Member Photos
To clarify things, the WWII Forums PhotoPost Gallery is designed to house member photos. In general it should not to be used to store WWII era photos. This is not to say you cannot upload photos from WWII or any other era, we are after all a WWII discussion board! Basically the Gallery is to share your own semi-current photos, art, and images. In time we will have an archive to store WWII-era photos, but this will be on a completely different domain separate from the Forums altogether.

I hope this helps some of you Rogues out there with respect to our Gallery, feedback is always appreciated.