Uploading images of minerals to Mindat

Uploading images to mindat is not a difficult process, though if you have never done it, the process can seem mysterious and daunting. But many people have uploaded hundreds and even thousands of images to the mindat galleries. About 200 images are currently being added each day which is even more than last year. There are something more than a quarter of a million images in the mindat galleries that people can use and search for in various ways. All images submitted for upload must be less than 6 megabytes in size.

In the beginning Mindat would take almost image that anyone would care to upload. Today that same policy is in force, but managers look at the incoming images and select those that that they think will be useful in the general galleries. When you sign up for Mindat, among other things, a personal image gallery is created for you and all the images you submit go directly there. You can search for images in your gallery in a variety of ways. It may take a few days for an image selected for the general gallery to appear there.

Please note: attaching an image to a post on the bulletin board will not place an image in the mindat galleries and that there is no way to search for these attached images and they can be difficult to find after they are a few months old. Also these images cannot be used in the best minerals articles, unless you upload them again using the photo upload form on mindat.

The criteria that is used to determine if your image will appear in the general gallery will vary with the manager reviewing the image. But in general we require that the images be in focus and well lighted. In other words the managers must be able to see what is in the photo without straining their eyes. The managers look at what is in the image and read the caption to see if the caption is reasonable and matched what is in the image. If your caption contains stuff that looks like advertising for commercial purposes it is likely to be rejected out of hand. If the image is of a mineral they use their experience to judge if the mineral is likely what the caption says it is and if it is likely to come from the place you say it does. If the image is a mineral they will also check to make sure that you have specified how big the specimen is or at least that the viewer by looking at the image or caption can tell how large the specimen or crystals are that are in the image. Some people just say how large the specimen is or the crystals in the image are or what the field of view is. Others place measuring scales in the images, rulers, or just hold the specimen in their hand(s) when the image is taken. Any of these things are fine. The use of coins for size markers though accepted, is not recommended, because this is a true international site and not everyone knows what the size of a particular coin is.

If the image is deemed interesting enough but there is some question regarding the species, locality or size, the manager will send an email message to you asking for clarification and possible editing of your image in regards to the species, locality, size, caption etc. If your image is a low quality one or if we already have many images of similar low quality specimens, your image may be assigned straight away to the user only gallery. We think as our gallery of images grow, that more and more stringent standards will be applied to images submitted to mindat. Right now the large majority of images submitted to mindat are accepted in the main gallery.

Your specimen does not have to be a killer diller to find a place in our gallery. We are happy to have images of minerals that show good examples of various kinds of cleavage to site just one kind of mundane example. We will gladly place those in our gallery right next to the finest know examples of gem minerals. Mindat is an equal opportunity employer and is not just for trophy material. There are some minerals that we don't have any pictures of at all. These are mostly rare minerals, but we will especially welcome images of these minerals even though they may not be attractive at all. We will also welcome images of cut and polished items like good agates and other lapidary materials as long as the captions describe them in standard mineralogical terms.

You can upload images of minerals and mineral localities to mindat as well as other types of related images, and the procedure for each is only slightly different. Here we are going to talk mainly about how to upload images of minerals. First make sure your image is less than six megabytes, other wise when you try and upload it, the program will grind away and you will eventually get a message that you can not upload it because your image is larger than can be accepted into the gallery. Although there are other ways you can upload mineral photos to mindat, the easiest way is to first locate the exact locality it is from on mindat. To do that you go the bottom of any mindat page and type in part of the locality name in the locality field and click on search. Example: you want to find the Red Cloud mine, the one that produces the fine red Wulfenites in southern Arizona that collectors cherish so much. Type in Red Cloud into the locality field and click on the Search button. You will be presented with a search answer page that lists (currently) 76 localities that have Red Cloud in their locality strings.



You will need to use your mineralogical and geographical smarts to find correct one (often, but not always it will be listed with a 'Did you mean...' option at the top). In this case we should have:

Red Cloud Mine, Silver District, Trigo Mts, La Paz Co., Arizona, USA

Click on that entry. That will take you to the page for that locality. To further check if you have found the right one, you can click on the Mineral Photos menu choice at the top of the page and look at the specimens from that locality in our general gallery to make sure that you have found the right place. If you cant find pictures that look similar to your specimen it might be that your specimen comes from another locality. At this point you can search mindat's general image gallery for the particular species you have and see if you can spot its correct locality. If this fails, you can post the image on the bulletin board along with what ever questions you have about it or its locality. Once you are satisfied that you have found the right locality go to its locality page like Red Cloud or what ever, you click on the Add Photos menu choice also located in one of the little boxes at the top of the page.

Clicking on the Add Photos menu choice will open the first part of the Photo Upload Form.



In this part of the photo upload form will be two buttons. The first you you will click on will say Browse. When you click on this one you will open a browser window and you will use this window to select the image, usually a .jpg image, that you want to upload to the Mindat galleries. Remember your image should be smaller than six megabytes. You know about all that stuff, right? When you have selected the image it will put that image name into the space just to the right of the Choose Image button. When the name of your image appears there, click on the Upload button and after a few seconds (a lot longer if you are on dialup) the rest of the Photo Upload forum will appear and in it will be a small thumbnail version of the image you want to upload.

Just below your TN image in the Locality section of photo upload forum will be a long skinny field that contains the complete Red Cloud Mine locality string that Mindat currently considers is correct for that locality. You don't need to do anything to that locality. It has automatically been added there for your convenience. Just below that in the Mineral name(s) section are eight little fields. In these you will put the name of the mineral(s) that are on your specimen.



Only the first mineral field is open to you at this time. You will type in the name of the main mineral on your specimen, say Wulfenite, in that first field and then click on the Find button at the right of the field and the program will search its species list and see if there is a match for Wulfenite. If it finds one, the Find button will change to Edit and you will click on the little down arrow at the end of the field and click on Wulfenite in the list of minerals that you will be presented with.

There is an unfortunate glitch in the program that we will get fixed someday regarding some minerals like dioptase and a few others where the mineral you want to select appears first in the list of minerals you are presented with. Clicking on this first entry will not get the job done. In cases like this you must first click on the Please Select choice in the list and then go and click on the down arrow again and then click on the first choice, in that case Dioptase. When you do this, Dioptase will appear in the field, and simultaneously the second mineral name field to the right, will open up to receive the second mineral that is on your specimen, possibly calcite, if there is a second mineral worth mentioning. It is critical that you get the second mineral name field to open, even if you do not put anything in it. Unless this happens, you will not be able to upload your image.

Below the Mineral name(s) fields is some other stuff. The only required field here is the Type of Photo field and you will need to select the proper item from the list specifying the kind of photo you are uploading.

You should fill in the comments field and make sure that your specimen is properly described. This will appear in the caption area next to or below your image. Some people, especially mineral dealers, use rather florid language to describe their specimens and some of us find this excessive and offensive but others rather enjoy reading it. Critical here is that you must enter some size designation for your specimen. It can be in any units you want or you can just tell us how wide the field of view is. We prefer that you use metric measurements. If the specimen you are uploading is for instance being held in someones hand and we can see the hand or some other object of know size in the image, that in itself is considered good enough for relating the size of the specimen to us. Less satisfactory are the use of coins to relate the size of the specimen. Not everyone know what the size of a particular coin is. Someone in Pakistan may not know the size of an American penny. One notorious uploader to mindat feels that just the inclusion of a label in an image is sufficient to indicate the size of a specimen and there are those managers here on mindat that are driven nuts by that and are still trying to break him of that habit. Most photographers feel that the inclusion of measuring scales in images detracts from the quality and don't use them, preferring to specify the size of the image in the caption. But as you can see from the images in our gallery we are pretty flexible in how the size of the specimen is related.

We would encourage you to enter in this field all of the data about that specimen that is relevant to it. If it is a pseudomorph you should note that fact by calling it a pseudomorph or saying something like "anglesite after galena". If it is a twinned crystal you should put that in. You may also want to state what collection the specimen is from. Users have the ability to search these caption fields for key words, so if you would like to find this image again by using certain key words, you should of course be sure to place them in the caption. When I enter images, I always, if possible tell what collection the specimen is from. As a result, if I want to see what minerals were in the collection of Arthur Montgomery, or the British Museum of natural history, all I have to do to find and see them is go the the search pages and click on the Search for Photos menu item and type in Arthur Montgomery or British Museum of Natural History and I will be presented with those images in the database that contains specimens from those collections. But if you don't put the key words in your caption, your of course can't find them using this simple method.

At the bottom of the upload forum is the copyright stuff and you will need to study that a bit and decide just what kind of copyright if any you want to put on the images you are uploading. You can choose to put the image in public domain and that means anyone can use it for anything. There are some other choices. At any rate, by uploading the image to mindat, you give mindat the privilege of using that image on its website in any manner it wishes. What ever you put in the Small Copyright Notice field will appear in the caption bar located below the image in those images use in the Best Minerals project. I don't put in anything in this field because I don't want to take up unnecessary space on the caption bar, but I still hold the copyright that I specify on the image. Dealers usually want to fill in this space because it shows their name of the name of their business in the caption and it is a form of free advertising for them which we allow in return for the effort it took for them to upload the image. We do however frown on them placing a URL address in this space. If they want that much advertising they can pay for it. Collectors often fill in this field because it give them more face time, ....you know, their name in lights.

When you have finished this, just push the Submit Photo and Information button at the bottom of the page. As soon as you do this a dialog box will pop up reminding you how important it is to give us size information. If you have already entered the size information about your specimen you can just ignore the dialogue box. Also if you have neglected to fill in some of the required fields in the forum, a dialog box will pop up telling you that. After pressing the submit button, after a few seconds, a full page image of your specimen will appear with all the information you entered below it in the caption area and you are done. It might take a few days for your image to find its way into the main gallery. This is to give the managers time to look over your image and make sure everything is OK. In some cases, if the image is of poor quality, or you didn't put in a size designation or there is a serious question about the names of the mineral(s) or the locality is incorrect your image may be relegated to your user only gallery or you might get an email from the managers trying to tell you politely as possible that we think you screwed up and request your help in resolving the problem.

Other than than, you are good to go and upload your second image. Once you have completed your first upload, reflect on the the fact that there are a more than twenty people who have uploaded more than 2000 images to mindat and one who has uploaded more than ten times that number.

Adding "Child photos".
Adding another picture of the same mineral. If you have another slightly different image of a mineral you have already uploaded or several slightly different images of the specimen it is best to add it/them as a "child" photo(s). To do this you find the photo you have uploaded and when you have the large image on the screen (if you have found the thumbnail image of it, just click on it to produce the large image), click on the Edit this Photo button on the menu bar at the bottom of the image. When the Edit Photo page appears, scroll down the page till you get to the Other Photos of this Specimen section and click on the Click here to add a child image, link. Then you will more or less repeat the data entry process as described above. It is much faster to add a child photo than it is to enter a new image from scratch. Sometimes when you click on the Click here to add a child image button you will open a dialogue box that will say This will loose any unsaved changes to this page, Are you sure you want to add a new image now?. Just click on the OK button and continue.

Rock Currier [2010].

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