Some questions on photo quality

I think standards are good, including for timelines, and especially if they are clearly spelled out and consistently enforced. I look through the timelines, however, and I must confess to being a little confused what exactly those standards are. I've uploaded a few that were subpar, even to me, simply because certain colors are tough for my camera to capture, but I wouldn't be surprised or upset if they were deleted. There are plenty of free image hosting sites if I really want to have a particular image available online that isn't suitable here!

I think it's important to make the standards of quality known to people who join the site. I notice that most of the people posting poor quality images are people who post a large amount of photos at once. Usually that's a bit of a give away that they've just joined. Lots of people neglect to read things like rules on websites before they join them.

I just checked the "Upload a Photo" page, and noticed there's nothing about image quality anywhere on it. Maybe throw a note about it somewhere on the page? It might make people think a bit more before uploading a poor quality image.

Perhaps have a page as part of the joining process that has a 'i have read and accept the terms and guidelines of the site'. I have seen this several times. But for people that are already registered, the upload page reminder sounds good.

I think there should maybe be some standards for timeline photos, but not as high as those for the gallery.

Jude wrote: I ask because I keep seeing a lot of photos that would have been amazing had they not been taken on a webcam or phone camera.

It makes me so sad when this happens.

^I agree. It's been difficult for me to photograph my hair because my sister's NikonD5000 broke, but there's that little voice in my head that says it's better to wait until I can get a good photograph of my hair rather than post something of low-quality. There are so many other websites that host altered images and it's nearly impossible for someone to get similar results.

For me I always tend to look at Timelines before Gallery as then I can browse different looks instead of clicking onto just the "yellow hair" section or the "blue hair" section. A bugbear for me though is the amount of photos which are just of natural coloured hair where there isn't any noticeable difference e.g. it hasn't been coloured or styled into an updo and mohawk etc, just feels a waste of space to me and kinda fails to fulfil the meaning of this site - to have crazy hair! :P

i don't have a digital camera, i photograph my hair with my phone or webcam but i pay attention to how i do it. i do it outside in natural light or by the window and with this i can get a quality picture to post here. some of my photos are in the gallery and i took them with my phone and webcam. i think that if one knows how to take a good photo, the result will be the best achievable nevermind if you don't have a pricey camera. i see people having a wonderful camera with perfect lenses and they don't know how to use it and take crappy photos. that makes me so sad. indeed indoor lightning photos are bad, bad quality!

EDIT:

katox wrote: A bugbear for me though is the amount of photos which are just of natural coloured hair where there isn't any noticeable difference e.g. it hasn't been coloured or styled into an updo and mohawk etc, just feels a waste of space to me and kinda fails to fulfil the meaning of this site - to have crazy hair! :P

I think having standards for timelines, but lower than for the gallery, could be a good idea. There are times when I want to browse through the timeline, but don't, because of how many lousy photos you have to go through to get to one good one.

I think the biggest issues for the timeline tends to be photos that are too dark and/or grainy and photos that don't have noticeably dyed hair. I understand brown can be a dyed hair color but the point of the site is CRAZY color, not natural.

I think reasonably clear photos should be a rule. Doesn't have to be perfect, as not everybody will be using a digital camera, but it should still show the hair well.

Outdoors doesn't automatically make a good photo though. I almost never get good results from the outdoors!! The lighting has to be just right! I also feel much weirder and self conscious taking my own photo outside where others might see! :-p Having to fiddle around with camera settings because the exposure is too high can suck.

Sorry guys, I'm one of the guilty ones for using my phone(with its crappy 2.5 MP Camera. Yes, 2.5.) Just know that I usually have to take 100 pics before I actually get one even close to half decent quality. It is actually quite a pain in the ass, and I have been pondering buying a better camera just to take pictures for this site. My problem is that I'm a single mom so I'm pretty darn broke most of the time. Heck, I already feel bad about the amount of money I spend on my hair anyway lol. I also feel bad after realizing that it cost money to the site for photos, as I have been guilty in the past of posting several similar pics of the same hairstyle. I've been trying to post fewer pics, and I also cleaned up my timeline the other day and removed a few photos that weren't adding much to my timeline. But I'm not one that's going to post a hateful forum topic if my photos are deleted. Those people piss me off.

I also agree with katox...brown hair with blonde highlights isn't really crazy at all. It confuses me as to why some people even post to this site.

I like seeing natural hair in timelines, honestly, as well as examples of how light the person normally bleaches to and how the various colors fade. I try to include images like that because while I know they aren't nice to look at, they convey a lot of specific information. But now I don't really know if that's OK?

I agree with VerbumSap, it's useful to see where a person has come from with their hair, especially when products are listed in later photos so you can get an idea of how achievable something is. Granted, it may not always provide an accurate representation of the work involved, but as a kind of before and after process I can see its validity. What I don't like seeing is photos that don't seem to focus on the hair, like a pouty photo that cuts off at the forehead (unless of course the hair is long and a lot of it is in frame) or ones with lots of vignette effects. Yes yes, sepia looks very artsy and antique, but is useless considering that the gallery is often used as a reference encyclopaedia. I can appreciate that many people don't have actual sole-purpose cameras, but as dookie mentioned, effort is appreciated and if everyone could be as discerning in their choices to upload photos, there'd be more consistency.

I didn't mean to sound all "I hate natural hair" and I do agree it is useful to see a starting point and regular box dyes, but I've seen some timeliness that the hair never really changes, and this is mostly what I don't understand. Honestly my camera is so bad I shouldn't say anything about what anyone else posts

We have a gallery for natural hair. I think those pics still contribute in terms of hairstyle and it's nice to see the before-and-afters in timelines.

I agree that some of them are boring but for a timeline when someone wants to document their hair it's ok. It just won't make it into the gallery.

I appreciate all the feedback and I'm enjoying the debate. Please continue to voice your opinions.

Some things I think we all agree on: We don't like doctored images (we have a zero tolerance policy on this already) The standards for the gallery should be higher than timelines (this is already the policy) * I need to make the photo standards clearer and on the upload page.

I suppose in that case, it's what kind of standards we set for timelines then?

Would it be helpful if I did an article on taking a good photo with your phone?

@Dem, you mentioned vignettes etc. We try to get rid of any photos with stuff like this, even pictures with borders but there is such a mountain of pictures to get through, sometimes the occasional one gets in. There is also what I like to call "legacy crap" which is rubbish photos that were uploaded before we started moderating every photo uploaded.

If anyone sees a photo that's been messed around with, please click on the photo use the "Report this photo" link to the right of the image. A photo needs 2 reports to be removed. It would be a great help if you could do so

lucyblue wrote: I didn't mean to sound all "I hate natural hair" and I do agree it is useful to see a starting point and regular box dyes, but I've seen some timeliness that the hair never really changes, and this is mostly what I don't understand. Honestly my camera is so bad I shouldn't say anything about what anyone else posts

Same here, it's just if it's picture after picture after picture of brown hair, I'm like "what on Earth?"

was just about to pipe up with an "oops, i have a natural picture" but it's more as a before than anything else, so i feel justified :p

i mentioned a while ago about having each look in a timeline as a cover for a mini-album, so you could put a before picture, maybe during or the picture of the stained bath/hamster after you're done but it still only takes up one slot on the timeline. that could be a way to eliminate the issue of having too many photos to scrawl through, then if there were a bunch of pictures that were low quality all from one time-frame (e.g. "my camera broke, crappy phone pics" until "yay, new camera") then it would be less obtrusive.

i stick by my idea ;)

I just wish there was a better way to warn people who submit photos that don't meet the guidelines. I really don't want to PM everyone because I don't have time to argue with them back and forth. Right now I'm looking at the mod console and groaning because yet again someone has posted a ton of photos where they clearly turned up the saturation. They all have to be deleted, but will they take the hint and fix them? No, of course not. sigh

Yeah and then we get email going "Why was my photo deleted?" and when we look at the photo, it's pretty obvious why.

I think putting the quality guidelines on the upload page will help here somewhat.

The only way I can think of to let people know not to upload crappy pictures would be either 1. a generic message "your photo was removed, see our quality guidelines for details" or 2. a check box we could use to give a reason for turning down the photo. Both have problems. Option 1 will generate a lot more email for us. It's hard keeping on top of the email concerning people's orders so I'm reluctant to invite more. Option 2 obviously makes the whole moderating images thing a lot more complex. There would probably still some email from people disputing it.

I will look into adding some mechanism whereby people can't upload the same photo twice. That will cut down on moderating since I see a lot of repeat photos after they've been removed.

@ickle, I like your idea but it doesn't really fit in with the workings of the timeline. The way it's coded, the whole thing is date-based (you can see this in the urls, for example, if you go to timelines and add the year onto the end of the url you only see images from that year, add a month and it filters down further). It wouldn't work as a bunch of mini albums and we'd still have the problem of a lot of dull images in the All Timeline Photos page.

Hmmm I'm not sure what we're going to do because I don't want to create more work for us either. The photo situation keeps getting worse though. I seriously just deleted over 20 photos because of crap like saturation and borders. And I'm sure they'll be re-submitted in no time. I believe repeat offenders should have their accounts taken away from them or at least have their photo uploading privileges revoked. It would save us a lot of time and hassle! I've argued with a couple of users lately about why I deleted their photos and they really irritated me. I have no patience for immature whining and a total disregard of the rules.