Gallery Frustrations

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59North
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Gallery Frustrations

Post by 59North »

For myself, looking at the finished models of others is a very enjoyable pastime. I consider this hobby to be an art form, and never think of it as men playing with toys. The hobby develops a skill set far exceeding the work of those putting oils to a flat canvas; we have to work in 3 dimensions, after all. We are more like sculptors.

As I page through the galleries here, I often become quite frustrated that far too many photographs are missing, or removed. It completely ruins the enjoyment of my purpose.
Now, I know the PB debacle is a huge reason for lost photos. That's not all of it, though.
Many have been deleted or moved from the host for any number of reasons.
I am no expert on gadgetry, but, I do have a question.

If a gallery is created to view the fine work of other artist's, can it not, at least, be made to be permanent?
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Re: Gallery Frustrations

Post by rob_van_riel »

59North wrote:If a gallery is created to view the fine work of other artist's, can it not, at least, be made to be permanent?
Sadly, no, this cannot be done.

All of these galleries depend on image storage space being available and accessible through an unchanging address. For the truly fundamentalist, we cannot even guarantee that the current addressing and transfer protocols will still exist a decade from now. More practically, none of us can guarantee that the domains we use to store our images on will be available to us in the future. Sooner or later, something will change that invalidates all the web addresses used in the galleries, and unless the owner puts in the effort to change each and every post he or she made to reflect the new addresses, galleries will fall flat. Everything on the internet is by the very nature of the medium volatile, and nothing can change that sad fact.

That is not to say things could not be made a lot better, but this takes resources, effort and skill that may be beyond the capabilities of many posters. The closest we can get to permanence is to host the images on a domain owned by the owner, and under full control of the owner. No free hosting services liable to vanish overnight, no hosting linked to your access account with your ISP which you might need/want to change, but everything on your own domain and separately paid for server. Even that is not bullet proof, and will fail or mean a discouraging amount of work when (not if) fundamental protocols change, and should the owner die (and let's be honest, everyone does eventually, and modellers aren't the youngest population), it all depends on the willingness of the various heirs to keep that infrastructure up and running.

And of course there's the annoying little fact that what applies to the images also applies to the various fora themselves; due to all sorts of circumstances, every one of them could be shut down and gone forever at a moment's notice. Such a disappearance would have the dubious benefit that no one would notice any crippled galleries hosted there, of course.

Never assume that anything on the internet will still be there tomorrow. If you can't bear to lose an internet resource, pull a copy to your own systems, have backups, and have backups of the backups. Data hoarding demands paranoia and large harddisks :twisted:
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59North
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Re: Gallery Frustrations

Post by 59North »

Thank you for the answer, Rob. I'm a very primitive tech person, however, I can understand what you said.
That being said; It stands to reason, that if a forum owner desires the greatest forum available, a volunteer editor should be engaged. This persons purpose would be to edit fallen posts, and clean up the forum for the members visual happiness.
That might be a stupid idea; it is only an opinion. As I've said, I'm not tech, so please don't hang me for coming up with dumb ideas.

Anyway, it is rather nasty to view galleries that have no photos. I guess we'll just have to live with it.
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DavidWomby
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Re: Gallery Frustrations

Post by DavidWomby »

59North wrote: >
a volunteer editor should be engaged. This persons purpose would be to edit fallen posts, and clean up the forum for the members visual happiness.
>
I agree it's VERY frustrating but Rob has described the realities very well..

Unfortunately, even if a volunteer could be found for such a big job, it's not possible unless that editor has access to either a) the image files that the original poster uploaded to the internet for storage and display or b) the locations that the poster stored them on the internet.

In the case of a) that is each individual poster's PC or maybe smartphone and; in the case of b) well, if they had access to that location on the internet, you'd be able to see the images now in the original thread anyway. I suppose b) is possible if all posters told the editor where to find the images and granted them permission to access them. Then the editor could move them to a public location but as Rob says - that new location may well not be permanent. It's also almost as much work for each original poster as it would be to repost the images in an accessible location themselves. So not much hope, I'm afraid.

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Re: Gallery Frustrations

Post by rob_van_riel »

59North wrote:That being said; It stands to reason, that if a forum owner desires the greatest forum available, a volunteer editor should be engaged. This persons purpose would be to edit fallen posts, and clean up the forum for the members visual happiness.
Even assuming such a person could be found, this opens up a legal can of worms. Without an editor, all that can be asked of forum operators is that they remove any illegal content that's brought to their attention, while the full responsibility for the contents of posts remains with the posters. Once an editor is employed, however, legal responsibility for everything on the forum lies with the operators, as everything is now considered to be at least co-written by them. Not a safe situation to be in.

Not trying to gun down otherwise good ideas here, just pointing out the nasty realities of the big bad internet :cry:

And yes, I agree, threads/galleries with all the images gone are frustrating. It's bad enough for galleries, but it will just plain kill a tutorial :roll: Good thing I have those large harddisks I mentioned earlier :twisted:
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Re: Gallery Frustrations

Post by iggie »

I think one possibility is for the site to host it's own image storage, which although not entirely guaranteed for some the reasons outlined above does tend to preclude demise of or interference with separate hosting sites. However, as with most things in life it will likely come with a hefty cost, requiring subscription by members, donations and/or sponsorship. I suspect the same (or similar) legal can of worms outlined by Rob above may well then become an issue....
Best wishes

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JohnRatzenberger
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Re: Gallery Frustrations

Post by JohnRatzenberger »

Speaking as a member of the Admin Team, but not for them.

Please review our Forum Rules: http://www.uamf.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=176; in particular the emphasis on the poster/member being the owner and being responsible.

While I agree, all the missing images are annoying, there is ultimately little we can do. I, to avoid the disappearing host problem, host my own images - that doesn't mean that when I'm gone, my heirs won't cancel the service, regardless of my wishes. OTOH, we have had a few members who have taken the time to go back through their PB-problems and correct them, for which we are grateful.

As older hands might remember we had a couple departures who took their images and/or posts. We cleaned up as best possible, but other than that we will not. Part of that is that we are all volunteers, it's a hobby, etc. Another, and far more important, part is that we do not believe in deleting posts for any reasons other than the most egregious and even for that we have some procedures and collective decision making. It can be a slippery slope and one of the worst things that can happen is that UAMF (Admins) get a reputation for censorship, editing, etc.

The other issue, at least in discussion threads, is that deleting image-less posts potentially renders more than that one post useless and can make much of a thread meaningless.

Now, cleaning up the Galleries could be a possibility, but I think we would want to be sure (and how can we?) that the owner isn't about to come back any ol' day and wonder where his posts went.
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59North
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Re: Gallery Frustrations

Post by 59North »

jRatz wrote: Now, cleaning up the Galleries could be a possibility, but I think we would want to be sure (and how can we?) that the owner isn't about to come back any ol' day and wonder where his posts went.
The galleries are exactly, specifically what I was referring to in my original post. A gallery should be a place of beauty and joy, where one goes to see the fine work of fellow modellers. It's like an art gallery or a museum; how would you like to go to a model show that had no models on the tables. I'm fairly sure one would feel cheated in that event.
Through this discussion, I'm realizing that the Internet can certainly be a fickle monster. Having grown up with a slide rule and not a computer, and not having ever taken computer courses, I simply don't know much about the Internet. And I don't want to learn either; I find the gadgetry of it all slightly overwhelming.
All I wish to do is go into the gallery and look at beautiful finished models in awe. I want to wonder how they did that. That can't be done if the pictures are not there.

I'm not complaining with intent; I'm not venting either. I'm just trying to help out so we can all find joy in our preferred forum.
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Re: Gallery Frustrations

Post by rob_van_riel »

59North wrote:Having grown up with a slide rule and not a computer, and not having ever taken computer courses, I simply don't know much about the Internet. And I don't want to learn either; I find the gadgetry of it all slightly overwhelming.
Look at it from this point of view: if the power goes down, your slide rule still works. You can rebuild, while the computer chumps like me have fun trying to reboot their existence from before the stone age. :twisted: I'm also fairly certain you'll never face depression due to overuse of social media :-D
(Neither will I; until I ended up on this forum newsgroups, if anyone remembers those, were as 'social' as I ever got. In the obscenely fast changing digital world, I'm as much a dinosaur as the slide rule boys, despite my CS degree and twenty years of writing software)
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FAAMAN
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Re: Gallery Frustrations

Post by FAAMAN »

When PB thoughtfully changed it's hosting rules (thankyou again PB :evil: :evil: ) ALL of my pics dissapeared from the various forums I belonged to as well as barring my access to personal photos
I cannot recover as the hard drive they were stored on "fell over" and needs some very expensive tech recovery :evil: :evil:
It took me a long time, 28 days (?), to find a new host (Flickr) and re-upload all my images, then go through all my posts to relink my pics to Flickr. It was a lot of work but I felt that it was worth it to do. ;-) ;-)
Maybe I'm odd for going to all that trouble but pictureless threads are depressing and annoying as it seems the poster doesn't really care for their own work which to me is beyond comprehension, my modelling, no matter how bad the finished product is has a little part of me in it and posting a pic is quite a personal thing ;-) ;-)
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59North
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Re: Gallery Frustrations

Post by 59North »

Anyway, with the PB debacle combined with the current PostImage fiasco, the galleries are really messed up now.
It's probably just me whining, but, I do enjoy paging through galleries of the beautiful work from others.
I've gone back to try and repair some of my more current posts. To do them all would prove nightmarish; it ain't happening.
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Re: Gallery Frustrations

Post by JohnRatzenberger »

59North wrote:Anyway, with the PB debacle combined with the current PostImage fiasco, the galleries are really messed up now.
It's probably just me whining, but, I do enjoy paging through galleries of the beautiful work from others.
I've gone back to try and repair some of my more current posts. To do them all would prove nightmarish; it ain't happening.
No, you are right -- these mass removals detract from the continuity, quality, and enjoyment of our little home and it is annoying.
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Re: Gallery Frustrations

Post by shangos70 »

Forgive me if this has been discussed elsewhere but what is happening with postimage? I've not been about for a week but having trouble seeing anything at the moment. According to postimages page all is well??
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Re: Gallery Frustrations

Post by chrism »

I've not seen anything either so I too am confused but has postimage gone awry in last 24 hours

I have uploaded easily this last few days to 2, builds
U
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Re: Gallery Frustrations

Post by JohnRatzenberger »

Shane, Chris,

Please see http://www.uamf.org.uk/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=17097; up in the Site Info Forum.
This cropped up late Thursday, early Friday. I have just added an update.

Chris, Go look at your Workbench, page 14 and prior.
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