Change photo order?

I'm wondering if there is any chance of making a site-wide change to the way the photos in mineral galleries are shown.

The current method, listing the images in alphabetical order of the geographical location seems quite redundant to me since there is already a search available to find images of a given mineral for a specific location.

I'd like to suggest using a different method . . . maybe listing images according to the number of views so that the more frequently looked at images - thus those that are likely better quality and more representative of the given mineral species would be at the top. There could even be a section at the top of each gallery to show the most recent image(s) submitted for that species.

Hi Ken

That's an interesting suggestion, I hope many member will respond with their thoughts. I don't agree with your interpretation that lesser hit photo's are inferior to those with the highest views.

"maybe listing images according to the number of views so that the more frequently looked at images - thus those that are likely better quality and more representative of the given mineral species would be at the top".

Aren't the images at the top of each locality the popular vote anyway ?

Perhaps a new search facility in a drop down menu for 'most viewed photo's' would be more appropriate.

The photos within a mineral/locality group are ranked according to managers vote, user vote and popularity. The popularity goes up when the full size photo is viewed (so hopefully people don't bother with low quality photos from the thumbnails). There is a bit of noise in this system since search engines do cause hits, so the longer a photo is on the site, it's counts go up.

I agree with Ken and Debbie, and I believe that some minerals have to many pictures in there photo gallerys. There are some collectors that add ten or fifhteen almost identical child pictures of a certain specimen...

I also believe that there should also be something like "a quality sheck" before a picture could enter to the mineral photo gallerys. For example Romania suplied us with many good specimens in the past , but when you see the Romanian mineral gallerys of Calcite, Quartz, Berthierite,... 90% of the pictures ad specimens from these minerals are junk.

Like Ken and Debbie said, a new search facility to have a easier acces to decent pictures would make a big difference when browsing thrue many thousand pictures.

Regards,
Mario Pauwels

I think the current system actually works very well.

In many cases the fact that one photo has more "hits" than another simply means it has been posted for a longer time. "Hits" alone is not the answer.

Just my 2 cents worth!

I've grown to like the current system and rely on it on a regular basis. It allows me to do things such as going to the gallery for a given species and:

• view specimens from a representative sample of locations, eyeballing the page numbers from the first letters of the country names, without having to navigate the location hierarchy (with sometimes thousands of entries),
• answer questions such as, what other species have been seen in association?, again without walking locations,

etc.

That said, I have no objections at all against a different default sort order as long as there's a way to re-invoke the present ordering as an alternative.

Quote

I agree with Ken and Debbie, and I believe that some minerals have too many pictures in their photo galleries. There are some collectors that add ten or fifteen almost identical child pictures of a certain specimen.

On the mineral photo gallery from the locality page, only the top ten parent photos of a mineral are displayed in the gallery (you can go to a subsidiary gallery that displays all of the parent photos).

The photo search will display all of the photos, including the child photos.