Today I've made a few minor changes to our
User Photo Gallery which will hopefully enhance the presence of personal albums belonging to individual users. Thus, you can use our gallery similarly to photo hosting sites, such as flickr or photobucket.
The changes will be described via the series of screenshots below:
First, when viewing any photo in the gallery, there will now be a link to the personal album/gallery of the user who took that photo. While the filmstrip will unfortunately still display photos from the entire category, this new link will allow quick access to personal albums, thus navigation between image listings and the photographer's album will be faster. The new album link has replaced the "Go Back Home" link; you can still access the gallery homepage by using the breadcrumb link at the top of the page.
At this time, I cannot modify the filmstrip to include only photos taken by a particular user, though this would be a great optimization for the future.
The letter bar which allowed you to quickly run a search for other member galleries has been removed from the personal album page (it is still accessible from the gallery homepage for those who make use of it). Also, the table title now reads "Personal Gallery: Photos by [User]" instead of "Uploads posted by [user]". A title bar which more clearly identifies the page may be added in the future.
In addition to the postbit link (to the left of this post), personal galleries have always been accessible from the "Statistics" tab on any user profile. In the future, I may add this link to profile index instead of only displaying it in one tab.
The username link from the gallery index will now take you to that user's personal album instead of taking you to his/her forum profile. Conversely, once you reach the personal album page, the blue table heading that reads "Personal Gallery: Photos by [User]" is linked to the member's forum profile if you wish to view it.
When browsing any specific category, the uploaders' usernames will also be linked to their personal galleries.
I hope you find these changes useful and make greater use of the gallery! While it has seen almost a million image requests, its traffic is not comparable to the rest of the site, including the forum and the Lens Review Database.
As a reminder: all forum users are entitled to upload up to 50 total photos to the gallery! Any resolution may be uploaded, but each individual file may not exceed 1Mb. Site supporters, or members who have donated to the site to cover costs, have their limit increased to 200 photos and each of their individual photos may use up to 1.5Mb of disk space.
Finally, and as always, suggestions are always welcome! If there's anything else I can do to improve the gallery, feel free to mention it (especially if it's a quick change!).