"See photos from the event" link

[kalimar]

It would be nice to collect pictures from attendees and display them as an album for everyone to see. We want to keep the site very light weight so we should find an external service to link to. @pollygee has done some research already on this. Worth reaching out to her.

Some thoughts:

• Will privacy be a concern.
• Do we need a login.
• How easy will it be to manage.
• How are images presented.

[pollygee]

I am currently working on this with @teresafinn trying to find the best option. I have created some sample albums so we can see the differences and chose the settings we want to use. I sent her info in an email and I'm awaiting her feedback.

[spinecone]

awesome, thanks polly+teresa! 💖

[kalimar]

[pollygee]

@tpinecone if you want to look and give feedback too send me your email address and I'll send you the sample albums. The one that I like the look of the albulm the most - Lensmob has an issue with their upload so all photos would need to be emailed. The one with the easiest to use UI Yogile doesn't have the best picture resolution and I don't like the way they display either. Comemory is nice but we wouldn't have a way to check the photos before they get added, and I have a feeling people would just upload all of their photos good, bad, duplicates and in large numbers...I'm not sure that's exactly what we want. I think it would be better to have the best photos, it will look more professional and represent us well. But if others have different opinions, I'm totally open to that.

[kalimar]

@pollygee I'd love to see as well. Thanks!

[pollygee]

1.) Lensmob
- I tried several times to use the uploader and it just hangs. It never showed them as loaded but eventually they did show up there.
- I don't think the picture quality is great, but I like the way the pictures are presented.
- See album at https://lensmob.com/a/rfgtest
- To add photos email them to rfgtest@lensmob.com. You can also use the uploader here.
- Lensmob is free.

2.) Yogile
- $45/year for unlimited photos
- See album at https://www.yogile.com/ahqo3418/21m/share/?vt=hmDNv5C
- Looks like you need to create an account to upload photos. Maybe someone can confirm.
- I have been able to change the setting so I will approve photos before they go into the album when others upload photos.

3. Comemories
   • See albumn and upload photos at http://comemories.com/2272f8
   • Doesn't look like we can restrict the photos that people upload here so we could wind up with lots of bad photos or duplicates aor just way too many.
   • I don't see a price for this one.

[kalimar]

My vote is for lensmob but would love to get everyone's eyes on this @tpinecone @teresafinn @csexton @seanmarcia

[teresafinn]

@pollygee had some great ideas about criteria for choosing a picture managing tool:

• Ability to crowdsource photos/uploads
• Admin approval for photos to go in album
• Well-oiled functionality (uploader works well, etc.)
• Picture quality

I vote yogile because it hits all the criteria. Maybe not the best presentation of photos, but hits all core functionality delineated above. Wish it had easy to share social media links but not sure I'd rate that as super important as there are other ways to get that piece done fairly easily.

I do like that lensmob has easy social media sharing links but big drawback is that it's uploader isn't functioning well (or at all).

[pollygee]

@teresafinn added photos to the Yogile and I approved them, the process was super straightforward.

Teresa Do you want to try to use the uploader on Lensmob see if it works for you?

Does anyone else have strong opinions about the look/functionality of any of them. Or strong feelings about including all of everyones photos or only approving the good ones?

[kalimar]

If we have unlimited space - we can be a little more loose about sharing lots and lots of photos. I don't feel strongly about Lensmob, other than it's free. I also think it's kind of nice that you can email the pictures. Yogile sounds perfectly fine to me as well.

[pollygee]

@kalimar My only worry about that is that some people will upload all of their photos so we may wind up with pictures of the floor and the back of a chair and 12 photos of the same thing. It's been my experience that people do that on FB and it drives me crazy. I was worried that perspective attendees would want to see photos and click through them and see a ton of junk. But it's possible I'm worrying too much (I do that from time to time), I like the idea of it being somewhat professional looking.

[kalimar]

Personally, I'd like to see the more professional looking photos make their way to the Ruby For Good website. I also don't want to spend time vetting photos. But that's just me. Would love to hear more thoughts.

[teresafinn]

Re Polly's question: I tried all 3 platforms last night (including the uploader for Lensmob which did not work for me), and liked Yogile the best per reasons mentioned. I completely agree regarding not wanting to see a ton of junk—I strongly prefer avoiding tons of duplicates and accidental pictures of feet so vetting seems like a good idea. Administering that could, however, be somewhat challenging. Any thoughts about that?

I had originally been thinking this project was primarily embedding pictures into the site as a design feature—as in storing pictures as assets and featuring them as part of the design or finding a tool that helps us do that (albumizr, flickrit, cincopa, instagram must have something). When I mentioned this I was told photos needed to be stored in a database. I'm still not sure why? (Site loading speed very greatly effected?) I personally like photos as a design features for the main site and would love to see something that embeds a slideshow sort of thing. But if that's not possible for technical reasons then this seems great too!

[csexton]

For pictures featured on the website I think we should just check them into git. No need to have external assets at this point.

That wouldn't work for all the pictures since that could be a pretty sizable amount of image files 😳

[kalimar]

I'm glad we're having this conversion, even if it's a little long. Good practice for future work and I think it's been productive. First, an unbiased technical comment since I think I created the confusion that @teresafinn is referring to. A database would only be needed if we wanted to really manage users adding and removing photos. Otherwise as was mentioned, we could check them into git or use an external service such as flickerit if you wanted a dynamic album/carrousel of sorts.

Second, it sounds like we may have two different photo storage/presentation needs. The first is the one I think @teresa and @pollygee are talking about, a way to present photos nicely on the website. The second is just a way to bulk collect folks pictures with ease (which is what I thought we were talking about). Dropbox works well but can be a drag because you have to share permissions and can run possibly run out of memory. This might be where something like lensmob could be useful. Folks can upload whatever they want. We can keep the link rather private and anyone looking at the album does so with the understanding that it's for collecting and reviewing rather than presentation.

Does this sound right to everyone? If so, shall we voice our preferences for both needs? Here are my votes:

1. For photo presentation on the website: Some sort of carrousel iframe thing with carefully curated pictures
2. For collecting photos from folks: lensmob, unless someone has tons of dropbox space and wants to deal with that.

I leave you with this