[Adam]

As you may or may not know, our forum software includes a personal album feature, which has been disabled thus far due to the existence of our User Photo Gallery.

However, time has shown that the User Photo Gallery is more suited as a showcase or a collective/event gallery rather than a personal album.

Thus, I am considering enabling the personal album feature so that PentaxForums.com members will be able to have their own photo albums linked to their profile. Each album can be named and can have an unlimited number of photos (up to a certain total quota).

If there is enough interest, I will go ahead and enable this feature. It works similar to sites such as flickr, and custom albums can even be configured for social groups! Code to embed album photos directly in your posts is also available. Screenshots are attached.

FYI, limits for this section would be something along the lines of 50Mb for regular users, and 500Mb for site supporters. I don't know if I'll be adding any resolution restrictions, but this may be necessary so that inline display doesn't screw up.

Please vote in the poll to show your interest- I'm excited to hear what you guys may think of this idea!

Attached Images

   

Adam
PentaxForums.com Webmaster (Site Usage Guide | Site Help | My Photography)



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[Adam]

Further features of the personal albums include a permissions system, through which you can either make albums public, or restrict view to people on your friends list (or to people in a particular social group).

You can also use these albums as a type of online photo gallery.

[Ash]

Adam, this is a good idea.
PF can then be more of a one-stop shop for members wishing to post photos on the forum.
But I believe it would be best if there were no JPEG compression applied to images, at least to those images below screen resolution like 1000x1000.
I'd then have no hesitation to use the albums to link photos in place of other photo hosting sites.

[SteveM]

It sounds like a great idea. I mentioned that I would use it in addition to my regular hosting site. It's hard to say how much I would use it without trying it out and seeing what features it has.

It could really gobble up disk space which could increase costs so you might want to have a minimum donation amount. You also might want to think about what this means for recovery. Even with RAID and or a SAN, you can still have corruption from a write error, controller error, brocade switch screw-up etc. If someone posts something in the album then something happens and data is corrupted/lost, you could end up with someone that losses the only copy of the picture that they have. Even if you do a nightly backup you could lose a days worth of pics.

[Adam]

Based on current trends, disk space won't really be a problem. And while every effort will be made to back up data, I obviously wouldn't be able to make any guarantees.

[MRRiley]

Good idea, especially when combined with the Social Groups. This is where I think it would be most useful, enabling multiple members to submit to a common gallery for the group.

As someone else mentioned I would avoid any attempt to compress large images and just place a reasonable, say 1000x1000px limit on photos.

Mike

[monochrome]

Good idea, especially when combined with the Social Groups. This is where I think it would be most useful, enabling multiple members to submit to a common gallery for the group.

As someone else mentioned I would avoid any attempt to compress large images and just place a reasonable, say 1000x1000px limit on photos.

Mike

The Sightseeing Screwmount and Traveling Nifty Fifty Groups, that presently host photos on Flickr, would be natural Groups to use this feature. Any of the regional gathering groups would work well also. Common interest area groups (Landscape, Street, Film, the Lens Clubs) might also use this feature. It would probably be more productive for the rest of the Membership to view the theme collections that way than to page through the threads - and we avoid the current isuue of long load times on some of the huge threads like the Lens Clubs, Show Us Your Grain, Show Us Your Film Shots, etc.

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Last edited by monochrome; 12-04-2009 at 01:10 PM.

[Adam]

There would also be a box in the post editor to easily allow you to attach photos from albums. So I guess I'll get to work on implementing this soon

[SteveM]

I really like the direction this forum is taking.....watch our google!!

[Bart]

Would this be restricted to photos taken with Pentax equipment only?

[Adam]

Nope.

[Adam]

The album system has been enabled. A news announcement + guide will be coming up shortly.

For now, it won't be easily accessible through the navbar, although I plan on changing that in the near future. There is, however, a nice new twist which I will also announce. Thanks for taking the time to vote in this short-notice poll