feature galleries

How this long-ignored feature will work:

You will be able to specify an item you want to be featured on the home page.

Once you do this, a mod can approve or deny your request. It'll have to be a piece of art that is original and currently in your gallery.

After approval, a feature gallery image will automatically be made from the item you select.

The good news is that you won't have to wait for me to get around to making these images. (Realistically, I just don't have the time for it anyway.)

This normally would fall outside the scope of this first stage, but it deals with the home page so I will probably build it to launch with everything else.

Good idea? Bad idea? Discuss.

Will the automatic creation manipulate the image in some way?

An auto-thumbnailer would be nice, but I forsee issues with cels not being standard sizes. I also include things like pegholes and the writing in my scans, which I wouldn't want on a featured selection.

Perhaps allow for the user to upload a standard sized image, with an input to point to the corresponding cel in their gallery (for mod check)? Users already edit things like their link badges and header images, outside of the cel images themselves. It doesn't seem like a stretch.

Or perhaps both methods. User can select that the auto-thumbnailer do it, OR they upload their own?

A few options here:

* Users can upload a "dummy" item and hide it, then specify this item's image as the one to use.

* I can build out a specific interface for uploading a feature image. Not happy about that, but it would probably bee more intuitive.

How I intended to get around the "edges" issue:

* Crop the center 80% of an image, scale that down, use it as the feature image.

* Insist that people upload images of a certain size.

Realistically, we're probably going to size-manage whatever people upload via thumbnails, etc. Every site does it because they need that level of control. At some point during the work on the member areas, I'm also going to implement the new file uploader and tell it to reject large files. I'll also be simultaneously going through the image database and shrinking things of egregious size.

When the site was conceived, it simply was not possible to upload a 6000x6000 pixel image before your connection timed out. Times have changed and we need to start putting more restrictions on what size of stuff people can upload or the service will be crap for everyone.

The idea of a manual-override thumbnailer is probably going away at some point. It makes file management too hard. Some things have thumbnails, some things have no thumbnails, some things have grossly missized/corrupted thumbnails, etc. I need build a thumbnailer that is a little more 2010 first though...

Hi. I was just wondering, why can't we move away from having to wait for a mod to approve the featured gallery? What I mean is that I think there should just be guidelines on what can and cannot be featured by RS members. Then the members can just choose what they want to feature and the galleries will be featured one at a time, in a linear looping fashion. If control is necessary then perhaps the mod can just periodically review what has been enabled as featured by the gallery owner? I guess my whole thing is that if we're going to something more automated then it should be done all the way not just the thumbnail creation. :)