I think automatically generating thumbnails is not a very good idea for a couple of reasons:
- It puts unnecessary load on the server for little gain while for an artist who has made the original artwork it's a trivial task to make the thumbnail as well. - It takes the control away from the artist in creating the thumbnail as he sees fit. This is a very important point, as I'm of the opinion that a well designed and functioning thumbnail is one that is not made out of only "resizing" the original but also "cropping". A cropped up thumbnail usually has much more visual interest and is much more clear and inviting. IMO, resizing alone is a very poor way to make a thumbnail. Personally, if I were to place myself in the user's shoes, I would not be too thrilled to see the site automatically generate a poor quality thumbnail for me which I have no say in. So, in short I think it's too much trouble to go through to implement a feature which at the end is actually quite flawed in design. IMHO, of course. -Ali Davoodifar On 9/6/05, Henrik Nilsen Omma <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > You guys expressed an interest is doing some PHP/MySQL work on the new > art website. Over the past week I've dug into it a bit and taught myself > some basic PHP just to get it up and running, though this is not a > viable approach for the long term (ie. I don't really have the PHP > skills ATM to write good code). After launching the site, a few issues > have cropped up that could use some work. I'll list them here and post > them on the wiki: > > * Code comments and cleanup: there are very few comments in the code. It > might be a good exercise for someone to go through and add sensible > comments and perhaps even clean up the code in various ways if they have > the experience to do that. I already abstracted out some hard-coded > things like site name, contact email etc., from the original gnome > in-line versions to variables in the config file, but more of this could > be done. > > * Direct upload: The way we are currently uploading images is awful! the > gnome version had some server-specific stuff that I couldn't get working > and had to work around. Their version was less than super-convenient, > but ours is directly dreadful. It's quite easy for artists/users to > submit artwork, but it's then a very laborious process for the admins to > upload it and link to the right place. Getting it to work they way the > original does would help, but making a solution where the original > submitter uploads artwork and thumbnails directly would be much better > (into a holding area for evaluation). It would be good if you didn't > have to tick the box next to the URL field but that the application > detected that there was text in it and also what extension was used. > > * Automatically generated thumbnails (on upload). From backgrounds, > screenshots, etc. we could get automatically generated 96x72px > thumbnails with Imagemagik or GD, saving the uploader from making them. > > * Enhanced ranking system for better filtering: We will be using this > site for both WIP art and as a repository for end users, who might > prefer not to wade through tons of unfinished stuff with comments. > Perhaps we could add a flag to each entry denoting whether it's > production quality (this would apply more to themes and icon sets that > can be broken or incomplete) or just a default browse mode at 1 star > (currently 0) that can be changed by the user. Themes and iconsets might > also be associated with one or more releases (known to work with 5.10, etc.) > > I'm CCing the gnome art list on this too so we can coordinate > developments. It would be great if we could manage to keep the source in > the same tree so we can all benefit from future improvements. > > - Henrik > -- ubuntu-art mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art
