Photo/image hosting brainstorm post

[denise]

So, now that mark is working for Dreamwidth fulltime, we're going to be working on many of the "big" projects that we want to do. One of them is a DW-native form of photo/image hosting that will let people upload images, maintain image galleries, quickly post images, etc, etc.

It'll be a while before we can have something released, but we're starting the design-and-spec process now! We have some ideas of our own about how it should work and what features it should contain, but we're turning to you guys right now at the very start, before we say anything about how we want things to work, to get your input and ideas without influencing them.

What features do you guys look for in photo/image hosting? What would you consider a "must have"? What would you consider to be nice but not necessary? What would be your "killer app" for image hosting -- the thing that would make you go "oh wow!" a lot and recommend it to all your friends?

Don't think about whether something's possible or not -- we want to hear your pie-in-the-sky ideas, your craziest thoughts, as well as your list of what features you'd absolutely require before you started to use it.

Comments

[cesy]

Locking a picture to a particular custom access group would be handy.

Quick-and-easy process to upload and embed into an entry.

Loading from a URL as well as uploading from your computer.

Import from Flickr or Photobucket. Ideally also import from Scrapbook, preserving access levels.

[mark]

Also keep in mind, if you post about this, that we want to support video, audio, and other forms of media as well.

While our primary focus (now) is photo hosting, it'd be great if whatever we come up with will work for other forms of media too.

[noxie]

Video would be brilliant! That would be a killer app for me.

[lap_otter]

I would want an option, right on the upload page, to upload several at once. The ones I've found that I like best for this add another little textbox and browse button as soon as you fill the first, so there's always as many as you need and you can do as many as you like all at once.

A tags system would be nice, and a way to browse by tag.

And if you incorporate the idea of "galleries"--for god's sake, please make it make some sense. Livejournal's galleries and tags and the entire THING are impossible to use and they make between zero and -6 sense--on a scale of one to ten.

...I don't use Dreamwidth much, because no one I know uses it and so posting would be relatively pointless, but I really do love it to death over Livejournal. It's just cleaner, smoother, nicer--and the best part is that you guys are constantly trying to improve it, and that you invite input from users, and that we can see what you're doing. If Livejournal updates something, I don't even notice it until suddenly I don't know how to do something anymore. Here, I know what's going on all the time, and I love that.

[yvi]

Livejournal's galleries and tags and the entire THING are impossible to use and they make between zero and -6 sense--on a scale of one to ten.

Oh Gosh, yes. Glad to see I am not the only one frustrated by the system.

[green_knight]

You're not. It's slow, it's cumbersome, you need to upload and then try to get it to the right place and... I've used it when I wanted to restrict pictures, but I hate it.

[hendrikboom]

Most of my online friends are also on Livejournal. I post to my blog here, and have it automatically propagated to Livejournal. It just seems to be a good idea to have my posts in two places, just in case one goes sour.

But I still have to use both sites to see what others are writing, either in response or on their own.

-- hendrik

[jumpuphigh]

I would want an option, right on the upload page, to upload several at once.

This. I actually find FB's photo uploader to be a fairly nice way of uploading. I prefer the "check the photos you want" version but don't get too fussed with either.

First time using preview on DW commenting and omg awesome. Being able to preview without having to go through spell-check first is so wonderfully convenient.

[afuna]

The killer feature of a Dreamwidth-hosted image service for me, has always been having the security/access controls for an image can match that of an entry exactly. One enhancement I'd really like is to automatically match entry security when uploading an image for an entry.

Other nice things:
* easy way to find out which entries I've linked to this image from.
* usage statistics (which images are most seen, etc)
* keep the image name!
* icon galleries, the ability to quickly move an image (or icon set) from a gallery to your dreamwidth icons, along with their description text, etc
* description field suitable for alt text, separate from title/normal description

[copracat]

One enhancement I'd really like is to automatically match entry security when uploading an image for an entry.

This is a genius idea, but I'd like the option to set a default which could be overridden when posting, or to chose to match the security or not post by post. Say you had posted a pic to an unlocked post, then posted the same pic to a filtered post (filtered for other content, not the pic). The pic would disappear from the unlocked post for everyone not on the subsequent post's filter.

[afuna]

Hmmm, in my mind, the ideal goes something like this:

* when uploading the file from update.bml in the middle of making an entry, you have the option to make it match the entry security, or be an image-specific security setting. Default is to match the current entry security

** for draft posts and until such time as you post the entry, the newly uploaded image shall be private, because you haven't specified what the entry security should be. Once you have posted the entry, the image security shall match the option you chose above.

** once you've posted the entry, editing its security won't edit the image security (I suspect it would be too complicated otherwise -- but I could be wrong!)


* when adding an already uploaded image -- say you're on update.bml, and we have some kind of image browser for your gallery, the entry security doesn't affect the image security

** said image browser could, potentially, link you to a page to manage your images/an image, so you could still easily edit the security or whatnot, on the fly, before using it in your entry

[noxie]

+1

[turlough]

having the security/access controls for an image can match that of an entry exactly

Very important!

Oh yes, and keeping the image name!

[afuna]

tossing a couple more ideas out there:

* easier matching to current journal style?
* community galleries (possibly maintainers only)
* ability to resize images quickly
* ability to see which places have linked to an image? (e.g., not just in entries you posted)

* have it be available under exampleusername.dreamwidth.org/pics or exampleusername.dreamwidth.org/gallery, or something like that
* ability to store mood theme sets and easily import them onto your journal, assuming you have a paid account (no copy-paste and find-replace, please x_x)

[noxie]

Community galleries would be brilliant!

ETA: I like your other suggestions too. Seconded!

[cigarette]

Community galleries is a great idea!!!

[jd]

I know a lot of people don't like the auto-generated URLs that ScrapBook generates, but I really like having a URL that won't ever change despite moving the image around through galleries, or renaming it. Some sort of guaranteed permalink would be neat. I also like the way if you upload a duplicate image, it just gives you back the one you have already, instead of making a copy of it.

Basically? I want ScrapBook with an interface that doesn't suck as much.

[afuna]

How about:

jd.dreamwidth.org/12345/image-filename.png?

anything with jd.dreamwidth.org/12345/ would work, but if the filename in the URL didn't match the actual file name, you'd be either redirected towards jd.dreamwidth.org/12345/, or get some sort of message "Redirected from /12345/fake-filename.png", to avoid url-trolling.

Oh hm, but I guess that doesn't work for embedding, anyway.

[turlough]

Yeah, a permalink that never changes no matter how much I move the pic around in the gallery structure is definitely a dealbreaker for me.

[zarhooie]

I am an avid user of Flickr and doubt that I'll abandon Flickr for DWbilder entirely, no matter how shiny and delicious it is.

That being said, I've got a few hard-and-fast requirements for any photo-hosting service that I use:
-I *need* to have a good client that'll allow me to drag and drop photos. I love Flickr's Uploadr, which is slick, sleek and elegant.
-I need a way to tag my photographs and search through them.
-The ability to sort into sets. Ideally, A photograph would be able to be in more than one set.
-Picasa's got facial recognition software. While nifty, I recognize that it ain't gonna be pretty.
-I want a way to style everyone's photospace the way *I* want to see it, not how they want me to see it. Flickr doesn't allow customization of userspace, which I think is a logical decision. Customization makes it really hard to find anything.
-A cross-uploader of sorts would be kinda neat, though I'm not entirely sure how that would work.
-Integrated posting ability. Seriously, make this happen.
-Importer, obvs.

[afuna]

-Importer, obvs.

Oh yes, exporter, too. Probably rate-limited, so we can't be DDoSed.

[zarhooie]

Exporter/crossposter/whatever.

[holyschist]

IAWTC (except for facial recognition, which I don't care about). I'm afraid I'd be more interested in a nice graphical, easy way to post Flickr photos from the DW crossposter.

[afuna]

- some kind of API for clients to use

[roadrunnertwice]

Seconded.

[yvi]

* Be able to rename galleries/tags without urls changing - some kind of permlink would be great (maybe one short permalink and one http://pics.dreamwidth.org/yvi/something/something.jpg thing?), as I like reorganizing stuff

* If I can't have that, the entries that include the pictures I am moving around should automatically edit to point to the new location when I move stuff around

* Resizing options

* Slideshows

[noxie]

Seconding the permalink and/or automatic entry editing. That would be very cool indeed.

[tree]

FTP? maybe i'm just old-fashioned, but sometimes i find it a lot easier to organise things without having to deal with a graphical interface. faster, too.

[kerravonsen]

I like that idea.

[niqaeli]

Oh god, THIS. I want an ftp interface. Or, at the very least, some kind of boring non-graphical interface.

[azurelunatic]

oh goodness yes.

[sofiaviolet]

Fuck yeah. *wants*

I wouldn't have even thought of that. /o\

[delight]

Please yes this.

[kate_nepveu]

FTP!!

[lannamichaels]

Oh, please, please, please. FTP FTW.

[turlough]

Yes, yes, yes!

[ratcreature]

I'm easy. The only really essential thing for me would be the option to upload multiple pictures at once that doesn't require some flash/javascript that crashes my browser. I can't use photobucket anymore, because for some reason their upload thing just doesn't work for me at all. For a while I was able to find a link to their old-style bulk uploading, but then that went away.

One fancy thing I'd like would be to be able to create preview images in a size I like from just a section of the image on the fly. Right now I do that in my graphics program and upload the thumbnail extra, but it would be nice if I could for example pick the most interesting square area from the picture I uploaded with my mouse and then tell it that this was supposed to be displayed as 130x130 px or whatever even though it's an 300px wide area in the image.

[noxie]

"I'd like would be to be able to create preview images in a size I like from just a section of the image on the fly"

Seconded!

[kayloulee]

Point the first: OH MY GOD YES please. I have a terrible time uploading things to my Photobucket that aren't from a URL. I did manage to make the old bulk uploader work but it's old, they're probably going to get rid of it eventually. Actually, I can't even get single images to upload properly using the new uploader. They just fail again and again.

[ct]

If you make this service play well with iPhoto, I'd switch in an instant. It's nigh impossible to upload photos via web form once they've been sucked into that progam.

On a more practical level, most of what'd I'd want has been mentioned already, but I don't think I've seen these yet...

* photo sets/galleries should be able to be hierarchical.

* there should be an easy way to get the HTML I need to post an image somewhere. Having to go partway through the process of posting the image to my journal is not an easy way.

* As a viewer, the ability to leave comments on images would be cool. As the person who uploaded the images, I would definitely want the same control over comments that I have in my journal (eg, the ability to turn them off completely or for specific images/galleries, the ability to delete them, the ability to ban anonymous comments, etc)

[noxie]

I like the idea of being able to comment on images.

[florahart]

there should be an easy way to get the HTML I need to post an image somewhere.

I don't think this has ever occurred to me (mostly because I always just do the img tag by hand anyway so if I have the URL and image dimensions, then I have what I want), but I agree it's kind of nice when sites have a click here to copy and can see the value for someone posting lots of images. Regardless, the html that one gets from a little clickydoo should be complete, damn it, including h and w attributes and stuff. As far as I can tell, based on my flist's behavior, virtually no site does this.

*may have enormous pet peeve about images posted without h/w attributes because of the way LJ (reasonably) assumes an image without those things may be "large" because she so, so often has many, many image placeholders on a single page*

[rho]

DW let's you decide how you want to handle images without height and width attributes when it comes to placeholders. You can either treat them as large and have them hidden, or treat them as small and keep them.

[florahart]

Yes, I know and appreciate that there is an option there. Problem: since as I say SO MANY people do not include the attributes (including the image that says how many comments on a DW entry on my LJ flist, heh), I am about 99 and a half percent sure I would be equally annoyed by every dang page of my flist having a horizontal scroll bar, at least on my home machine whose resolution issues are epic. I figure people who are inconsiderate enough to post an enormous image uncut in the first place are probably less likely than average to do a good job with the code, you know? In any case, at the moment, there are five image placeholders on the first page of my LJ flist (not including the aforementioned DW comments issue), which is an fairly low number per my nonscientific general sense of these things as related to my own flist. There is one image with correct attributes, which is--seriously--an unusually high number. Since it's frequently more like 12/0, I put the odds on one or more of those twelve leaving me scrolling.

Oh, but, as long as I'm thinking of it, I'd love if I could set that information by group/user/something somehow, so that, for instance, icanhazcheezburger's feed (which gets the placeholder, and I realize dealing with getting the attributes right for feeds is a whole other issue), I could just choose to "trust" and show the right size in the first place or just choose to only give me the text and I'd click the link for the feed's images (which is what I have to do ANYway with the placeholder, but at least it would be less ugly). Or I could choose to always show images for folks I have in reading filter "doesn't drive me crazy with enormous images" or something--like, not when I am reading IN said filter, but when their posts show on my reading list in the first place. Implementing this with any degree of granularity of control would totally be a pain, I think, and it's outside the scope of this post's question, but eh, it's SORT of related. :D

Back on topic: in any case, I would like any scrapbook-like thingy to encourage folks to include good code, including also other attributes. I don't so much think it can be enforced, but it certainly can be the case that any automatic c/p thing for inserting code can have h/w, and that any "choose your image" dialog box can include a blank to type in alt text, too, to remind and encourage.

[kerravonsen]

As others have said, permanent links to images so that one can move them between galleries and/or retag them and the URL to the image doesn't change. But I also loathe the "54321" style of image naming that LJ's scrapbook has; it's so unfriendly. I would like the link to be something like
username.dreamwidth.org/pics/something/myimagename.jpg

Of course, one doesn't want to accidentally overwrite an image because one has forgotten that one already has an image of that name uploaded. Maybe that could be resolved by giving duplicates numbers, like "myimagename2.jpg" or whatever.

Thumbnails for the images shouldn't be bigger than the images themselves; that can be irritating when one has a 100x100 image (a usericon) and a 150x150 thumbnail.

Being able to arrange the order of images in a gallery is essential.

Making it easy to post images in comments would be good. I run an icon-challenge community, and entries are done by posting the usericons in screened comments to a challenge post.

An automatic journal post when images are added to a particular gallery; this would make it much easier for people to manage personal icon-journals, because they could just upload/move the icons and then it would automatically notify people subscribed to their icon journal.

It would be nifty if the gallery could leverage off the existing style system, so that one could choose to have a given gallery have the same style as one's journal, or a completely different style.

[cesy]

An automatic journal post when images are added to a particular gallery; this would make it much easier for people to manage personal icon-journals, because they could just upload/move the icons and then it would automatically notify people subscribed to their icon journal.

That's such a cool idea.

[denise]

An automatic journal post when images are added to a particular gallery; this would make it much easier for people to manage personal icon-journals, because they could just upload/move the icons and then it would automatically notify people subscribed to their icon journal.

I actually am thinking about a way to make one's reading page include (if you want, of course) all kinds of activity, playing in with reading filters & subscriptions -- like, have a reading filter that's "picture uploads from all my subscriptions", one that's (if/when we offer it) "phone posts from all my subscriptoins", one that's "daily updates on any new bookmarks/memories my friends have added" (especially when we redo the memories function as bookmarks) -- that kind of thing.

Sort of like a play on Facebook's update stream, only without the suck. *G*

[sofiaviolet]

♥_♥

[anatsuno]

Ooooh.

[jumpuphigh]

Ooooh shiny.

[afuna]

An automatic journal post when images are added to a particular gallery; this would make it much easier for people to manage personal icon-journals, because they could just upload/move the icons and then it would automatically notify people subscribed to their icon journal.

Oooh, I like this idea. Tangent off that, how about a way to easily grab an image from someone else's gallery as an icon? Click it, it prefills the credit/description and alt text (if provided), leaving you to put in your keywords.

[dragonwolf]

Of course, one doesn't want to accidentally overwrite an image because one has forgotten that one already has an image of that name uploaded. Maybe that could be resolved by giving duplicates numbers, like "myimagename2.jpg" or whatever.

One person mentioned a few comments up about the behavior I think Flickr uses, where if you upload an image that already exists, it would take you to that image, instead of creating a copy.

Of course, one thing that could work would be to have the ability to choose which behavior you want to use. Maybe it defaults to making a copy, but you could set it to not make a copy and go to the existing image, or perhaps add an "ask me every time" option for those who might want to do a little of both?

[akk]

So many useful things have been suggested already, so that I have only mundane wishes left.

* warning and/or avoiding of a pic URL being "triggery" to adblocking software (happens a lot with my photobucket account, which includes the string "adv" in its URL, for example) and offering an alternative to the problem

* allowing hotlinking to the pictures from elsewhere (important for crossposting or mailing URLs)

* an info for people who try to look at a picture and are denied, that they are denied (and for what reason), instead of just providing a blank space for them in the entry.

* an info for the picture owner if/what people are denied, preferable in the embedding dialogue to journal/communities. It's so easy to embed a picture in a community post that's still locked and people go "uh..." and you notice only when somebody bothers to complain.

* the ability to have a picture stored full-size for download or watching after clicking on a link stating actual size, while a downsized version can be embedded.

* in galleries with multiple lines and rows: no ugly "not there yet" pic or empty frames, instead of a blank space

* ability to share a defined amount of one's storage space for pics with other users (also non-paying ones, esp. if they are excluded from the media stuff - as on LJ). The same would be nice for "polls", btw. :-)

* a line of preview icons of certain pictures in a gallery to be had in the profile sidebar (or as footer), would be cool. Best with choosing which pics are shown (and maybe the option of an auto reshuffle for fun).

[sofiaviolet]

Tangent time! ;)

* ability to share a defined amount of one's storage space for pics with other users (also non-paying ones, esp. if they are excluded from the media stuff - as on LJ). The same would be nice for "polls", btw. :-)

Not sure how that would work for polls, as those aren't limited in quantity. You can't share X of your Y available polls with another user because Y isn't an actual limit (if that makes sense).

I can definitely see the appeal of sharing X amount of one's Y storage space, but I suspect it wouldn't make sense from a business standpoint, much like a la carte paid features wouldn't make sense.

I would love for paid communities to have media storage which could be used by members, but I'm not sure how to prevent abuse.

[akk]

I know the suggestions aren't business friendly. But since denise wants to hear about "the pie in the skies", I thought why not toss it out? :-)

I know polls aren't limited in numbers, but it would still be nice to give one to somebody who wants to poll "just this one question". It happened to me on LJ and if there hadn't been a nice person gifting me with a month of paid time there... It just came as an afterthought. This is about media files, after all.

[dragonwolf]

You could still allot a certain amount of polls to a person. It wouldn't be "X of Y available," but simply just "X polls."

[dragonwolf]

(also non-paying ones, esp. if they are excluded from the media stuff - as on LJ)

It'd be nice if the free users would be able to at least have photo hosting ability. Perhaps have various tiers of what can and can't be done based on what type of user a person is? Maybe allow free users to have pictures, but not videos/music, and maybe only let them have basic filtering options (public, access list, private), and save the video/music hosting and advanced filtering options (reading/subscription and custom filters) for the paid users.

It always seemed odd to me that one of the big paid features of LJ is something that's offered for free in a myriad of other places (albeit, probably without a few toys that LJ can probably implement).

Besides, offering even limited media sharing starting at the free level would give DW another advantage over LJ.

[elf]

Free users getting a tiny amount of photo hosting would be a great way to drum up popularity; it's something that none of the other journal sites offer. (I think. I know GJ did, but had problems with it.) Even if it's just 5-10 mb (or less; I remember when 2mb was huge space on the web), that's plenty to hold background images for a journal layout, a personal photo or two, and a couple of pieces of fan art that might have to be rotated to show new material.

A limit of "10 images or 10mb, whichever comes first" should be low enough to avoid server strain, and high enough to avoid the constant low-grade annoyance of having to involve another service to host one's journal header image and picture-of-self-in-costume.

one of the big paid features of LJ is something that's offered for free in a myriad of other places

Legacy issues. LJ was started when image hosting wasn't a toss-in freebie because disc space was more expensive and limited, and now they're too popular to safely offer it--with free accounts for everyone for the asking, even a tiny bit of storage space would be effectively unlimited; people would make hundreds of accounts to store photos. (Oh, and they'd have to get actively involved with policing the porn.)

[charmian]

Hmm, one thing that might be interesting is, since you're going to be having the site wide search, allowing people to search for images (by tags or captions?) as well.

Things I've found useful on Tumblr:

Auto-photo post. Meaning an option to easily post the photo to one's LJ, in a semi-pre formatted way.

Ability to upload a pic from an URL.

Other things:

*Ability to upload a photo as an email attachment by mailing an address
*Ability to prevent people, should we choose, from hotlinking our images
*Ability, should we choose, to have a link that would let people easily download the images, or perhaps even an entire subgallery as a zip. (like it zips the subgallery automatically)
*Galleries within posts (Posterous has this feature)
*Ability to make filters of who gets to see the image
*Ability to have an RSS feed of photos uploaded to the gallery
*Option to password protect a photo (in case one wishes to show it to someone who is technically inexperienced and unable to figure out what openID is)
*Drag and drop into a window upload

[noxie]

I love the idea of being able to password protect a photo.

[hatman]

Most of my thoughts so far have already been mentioned. But then, I don't use photos that much, and I'm pretty happy with Flickr's services.

Stuff Flickr does that would be nice to see carried over:

Easy uploading
Sets, tagging, descriptions
Visitor comments
Automatic resizing
Basic photo editing
Access control
Interface with other sites (you can create stuff over at bighugelabs, and have it uploaded directly to your Flickr account)
Stats (for each picture and for your collection globally)
Place image on map (so you can show where it was taken and see other pics taken in the area)

But, like I said, most of that has already been mentioned. What I'd also like to see from a blogging service's photo hosting would be integration into the ^* RTE. So you can pick out images and galleries as you create a post, insert them where you want, move them around, resize, etc. Even post them as links. Or post thumbnails with links to the full size. Or embed a set of images (or a slideshow!) in a frame within the post so that readers can browse through them without having to navigate away from the entry.

^*One moment before I mention the name. I cast Protection From Evil!

Another thought - unified tagging system. A (preferably optional) feature where you can give pictures and entries the same tag and have that carry over. So when you go to look at hatman.dreamwidth.org/tag/thingy you see both entries and (thumbnails of) photos related to thingy. But then have a way to turn that off in case the reader doesn't want to be bothered with picspam when looking through entries (or vica versa). And maybe have a way to turn that off when I don't want my pictures of thingy mixed up with my posts tagged thingy (although that could be easily enough done by using slightly different tags for pics and entries).

Another tagging thing - Ability to opt in to tag collectives. So that you can search for all public pics tagged "thingy" (but not have your own thingy pics show up in such searches if you don't want them to).

Also, limited search options - all pics tagged "thingy" posted by people on your reading list, or on your access list, or who are fellow members of the thingy DW community, or who are in your custom filter group. So when you go looking for pictures of, say, "family," you know it's your family you'll be seeing.

Oh, and a way to sort photos and change the default order in which they're shown. Like, right now the pics at the top of my flickr photostream are some of the less pleasant ones in my collection. And when you go look at the various tags, they're shown the same way - whatever was uploaded most recently goes at the top. Which sometimes means that you're seeing things in reverse order.

[niqaeli]

Things I require:

* a gallery system that can be navigated by people who are neither rabid, deranged weasels nor BradFitz.

* an upload interface that doesn't suck.

Past that I am easy and don't really care. Until it's easier for me to upload photos to Dreamwidth, I'll keep uploading them to my domain.

I would actually really like to have an ftp interface as someone above mentioned. I like ftp. It's easy to work with. Failing that, a usable graphical interface.

[katieintheworld]

*seconds the request for a sane gallery system*

[hendrikboom]

The Linux pornview program is a moderately usable gallery interface. And despite its name, it works even for pictures that aren't porn.

[princessofgeeks]

something that would make me use it is instructions aimed at people like me who have absolutely no idea how to manage photos on the net at all. maybe links to good instructions for doing things like getting photos off your camera? if there are generic things like that?

maybe this is way beyond the scope of what you want to do, but i do have digital cameras and have played around just a little with loading them into my laptop, but beyond that i have no idea how to do anything other than size icons.

oh also: best practices on managing them once you get more than 100 would be good too. i guess you have to tag them right when you get them in there or you lose track of everything.

so links to primers about doing that would be appealing to me. but again: you are probably not wanting to be Internet School for Newbies, lol.

hi!

[azurelunatic]

So some sort of officially-blessed "how did I get here I'm not good with pictures" comm linked from the FAQ as a Helpful Resource, or something of the like?

[princessofgeeks]

exactly. :).

[jumpuphigh]

And could you explain all that stuff to my mom? *puppy eyes*

[florahart]

I barely post images, largely because I neither own a digital camera nor have particularly good toys for making them, so my needs are pretty basic. That said...

I'm aware many people love and adore clients like Semagic that they use to write their posts and stuff, but I don't, for several reasons: for one thing, Semagic specifically is apparently written for not-my-brain because it makes approximately as much sense to me as material written in a language I don't read on a disassembled jigsaw puzzle which is missing half its pieces and has also gotten wet and warped since last assembled; for another, I don't want to have to upgrade other softwares (possibly on multiple machines) to use a website; and I don't want to have to either carry around an application on a flash drive or download the dang thing to every machine I'm likely to use.

Because of this, I've always found it annoying that the scrapbook page advises me to download a client. I want the interface itself, as maintained on the website, to work, and make sense, and not make me have to visit thirty-eleven versions of the image I just uploaded in order to get its URL (this is silly; the first part is static anyway, so there's no reason it can't show me the list of thumbnails or whatever with gallery/image1.jpg 428x214 px or something right there). It also wouldn't kill me very much if rearranging images were something I could do, like, in a ...I seem to have lost the word. In a file structure, like when you want to move things around on your hard drive and you can open a window, get a list of files on the desktop, and either copy or drag/move them to my documents or whatever.

[rho]

Most of the stuff I'd want has already been mentioned, but two things that haven't been yet:

* I want an easy way to lock access to a picture to members of a community I'm in.

* I want an easy way to be able to license pictures.

[green_knight]

Lots of good stuff. The ability to use an uploader would be vital for me. One thing I notice about LJ is that it's terminally slow in everything I do and I regularly lose patience with it.

One feature I'd love is the ability to show (and maybe you don't want it shown, so there ought to be a way for the user to determine this) which posts a picture has been used in. Oh, and a very quick way to get the embed code for an image - choose from a dropdown menu which size you want to embed, and copy the result to the clipboard.

A couple things I like

[lorena]

About _Facebook and _Photobucket ...

Image links to the picture album. But I also hate that.

I think, you should be able to upload the image, and then have two types of codes listed:

1. URL for dumping into an img src tag.
2. URL with an img src tag with a link back to the full size image/album*

But I'm of two minds when it comes to albums, so each picture should have two addresses:

1. That traces back to the account and album, ie http://lorena.dreamwidth.org/photos/usrcreatedfolder/usrcreatedfolder/image.xyz

2. That does'n't trace back to the account and album ie http://obfs.dwpics.org/324837r893249038318u30921840930948u931084209.xyz

Re: A couple things I like

[thymindmaymove]

I like this! I wish more photo sites had link options like that.

[katieintheworld]

I value most the ability to write descriptions of individual photos. Not a title, but a full paragraph story that explains the build up and denoument of whatever that image is. Then post both the words and the photo worth a thousand more somewhere very close together. When I was travelling, this was so important to me, to document the experience.

I have found previously that it can sometimes be clunky to organize photos into a particular order without diving into the actual code. This is also important when you're posting a series of photos that need a particular order.

I would like an easy way to put a long list of photos in a post behind a cut tag without hand-coding it.

I'd like options of using photos already hosted on a third party site, like flickr, and also the scrapbook option.

The pie-in-the-sky idea would be an awesome drag and drop thing to just completely integrate the photos into whatever text you are writing at the time.

[dragonwolf]

Oooh, ooh! I have an idea for your drag 'n drop stuff!

Maybe have an expandable sidebar that navigates your gallery on the posting page and use something like the Yahoo API that implements drag and drop onto the editor. It could load the picture itself on the WYSIWYG editor (so it'd show up like it would if you were writing in a word processor) or an auto-generated IMG tag, if you're on the HTML editor.

As a web programmer myself, it'd be a royal pain to implement, probably, but would be awesome if DW could get it working.

[turlough]

I value most the ability to write descriptions of individual photos. Not a title, but a full paragraph story that explains the build up and denoument of whatever that image is. Then post both the words and the photo worth a thousand more somewhere very close together.

This, yes!!

[jumpuphigh]

Ditto

[justhuman]

*permalinks
*uploader
*slideshows - omg!yes
*Quick posting options
When you click on a pick, I'd like to see a couple code options off to the side, that lets you:
-specify the size of image, alt text,
-link back to gallery yes/no
-anonymize url so it doesn't trace back to the journal yes/no

I'm not upon all the embedding options that are current, but it would be nice to see the various code that can be cut and pasted into an entry.

*A gallery system - personally I've never had a problem navigating LJ's system, but I know other's complain about it constantly. Actually it would be nice to see some actual critique beyond "it sucks" to help everyone understand what doesn't work. I'd like to see a more multilayer gallery system

-Vacation pics
--2009
---Yellowstone
----day1

--2008
etc...

*Security - natch. Ability to lock photgalleries and individual pics

I've been using Picassa lately. While I wasn't a fan of downloading a client, I've come to like it because it brings added value. Things I like:

-Basic photo editing tools - crop, contrast, touch-up, add text,etc
-Ability to see thumbnails of multiple folders/albums at once
-Create an album and upload the album
-Store the same photo in multiple albums
-tracking of what has been uploaded and not uploaded
-photo sorting using drag and drop

[turlough]

Multi-layer gallery system is definitely a must.