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

[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.