Organising Your Photos On Scotster

A few little things to consider when adding photos...

ADDING PHOTOS TO YOUR PROFILE

Firstly, how to do it - go to My Stuff on the main menu and then Edit Profile. Choose Edit Photos from the buttons that appear on the left. Alternatively you can go direct my choose Photos on the main menu and then My Photos. This will take you to the same page, your Photo Manager.

Click the 'Browse' button and find the image you'd like to upload, click the filename to make it appear in the box. Then click "Start Uploading Photo".

This will transfer the photo to Scotster's server and to our 'checking area' - me or Ben regularly check out the new photos and make sure they're "family-friendly" and suitable for everyone.

Please please always remember to give each photo at least a meaningful title and some 'tags' to describe its content. This helps people to find stuff that they'll love, helps to connect people and helps Scotster to 'learn' about what stuff is associated with what (eg "mountain" and "hillwalking" often go together)

TO EDIT STUFF AFTERWARDS

To edit the titles, descriptions and tags afterwards, go to your Photo Manager and then click on the photo you want to edit. Make the changes and then click the confirmation button.

TO REARRANGE THE ORDER OF YOUR PHOTOS

Go to your Photo Manager. You can either use the little green arrows or the number system: clicking the arrows moves the photo up and down one position or to the top or the bottom of the list.

To rearrange things in one go, check out the numbers that appear on the right of your Photo Manager. You can move things around by editing the numbers and clicking 'Rearrange' at the bottom - this will rearrange the photos into numerical order based on those numbers. Soooo, for example, if you open up Photo Manager with five photos given numbers 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 and you want to move the 4th one to between the 1st and 2nd, just change its number from 40 to 15 and then click the button. Play around anyway, you'll get the hang of it.

TO DELETE A PHOTO

Go to your Photo Manager and click on the photo you want to delete. Under all the info there is a pull-down box that usually says "Update information". If you click it you'll see another option: "Delete this photo". So just choose that and then click the "Confirm" button.

TO INCLUDE YOUR PHOTOS IN A MESSAGE OR EVENT INFO OR FORUM POSTING

Wherever Scotster allows 'paragraphs' to be displayed, it will enable the inclusion of photos. This is done by adding the text "photo:" and then the code number for the image. But, to make life easier...

Click the 'Show gallery' button beneath the box where you enter information. Your image thumbnails will appear to the left in a little box with a scrollbar on it; scroll down to see all your images. To include someone else's images, just enter their Scotster member ID in the text box that also appears and click 'Go'.

Now, to add any image at the point where you were typing, just click on it. Scotster will add the "photo:" and the code automatically for you. You can include more than one, though go easy ;)

Question from a friend, if I joined would my photos be safe from downloading by others.? As a pro, I cannot allow others to use my photos without payment. Jason what do I tell him?

It is totally impossible to protect images that are visible on the web, purely because anyone can 'screen grab' using a PC or Macs built-in functions. Any photo on any web site can be grabbed if it is on the screen, no matter what you try to do to stop it.

That said, there are some basic things that Scotster tries to do to help guard against most people grabbing photos using the right-click or the idea of trying to copy the photo by going direct to the image's URL.

Have a read of quickfind:1033

There are plenty of professional photographers on Scotster - some add small copyright notes to the bottom corner of the actual image, some slap a big copyright message big and right across it, others just upload very small versions that if grabbed will be of limited use.

Scotster itself guards against people linking directly to photos by checking that it's a scotster.com web page that is trying to access the photo data.

But, like I say, if you put an image on the web, it can be screen-grabbed.

Thanks Jason this is more or less what he said. I,m still learning about thing like this.

How often do you check newly upload photos? I uploaded a new face shot (of my dad) early on Veteran's day to use as my avatar for the day. It wasn't approved until nearly 24 hours later, a little late for that purpose.

quickfind:macbeachbum > "How often do you check newly upload photos?"

Generally speaking, a couple of times a day but often it can be just once in the morning......and that's GMT of course. Doing it any more frequently can mean someone gets more than one email notification about their uploads if they're in the middle of uploading a whole load of piccies.

It's not often that they get checked less than once in a 24 hour period but it does happen, cos with the best of intentions there are times when we don't have access to a computer or t'internet......or there's no mobile reception.....or the pesky broadband connection throws a wobbler or goes to sleep......or the day jobs get in the way ;-) Modern living eh? Anyway, sorry to say that 11th November was one such day :-(

Thanks, Ben.

I have a suggestion: I often upload photos to Weather Underground (wunderground.com). They have a panel of volunteer reviewers, not sure how many, that can generally approve submissions within an hour or less.

Getting some folks in distant time zones can help, too, and I, for one, would be glad to participate.

That's a great idea Doug... at the moment though we do more for each photo than just decide on whether to approve or not - for face shots we categorise them into 'good face shot', 'low quality' and 'not member's face'.. and for main photos we decide on which will get 'featured' in the panel on the left as well as whether the photo is a bit "risque" and may need to be accepted but not ever show up in The Pulse or more public parts of the site than the photo owner's profile. For now I'd like Ben and I to retain control over that process.

I may look though at 'instant' approvals for Supporting Members where there is more of a trust factor that they won't upload porn or otherwise offensive or illegal content.

I sometimes have photos refused by the board because they are too big (over 1MB). How do I make such photos 'smaller' to be able to show them here? I am VERY low-tech, so please explain in simple terms! Thanks!

My suggestion is on your computer open Paint. Click File, then Open. A browse box will open. Search in this for your photo and upload it to Paint. Click on Image, then Resize/Skew. A dialog box will open. Reduce the Horizontal to 50% then the Vertical to 50%. Click OK. Your photo is now reduced to half size. Click File and Save as to save photo either under the original title, or a new title. You will now have a photo small enough for Scotster to handle. I know this works. I've done it myself.

Is there any way to QUICKLY reverse the order of all my photos? Sitting doing them one by one would be time-consuming. Could I also suggest that it would maybe be a better idea for everybody's photos to appear most recent first.

The 'numbers' on the right of the photos in your Photo Manager (Photos > My Photos) can be used to change the position of photos all in one go - but you'd still need to edit each one - though you wouldn't need to wait between each; just change them all then hit the Rearrange button at the bottom.

There is alas no quick other way to reverse them all.