Image hosting

The first order of business is to decide where best to host and share our images. I'm also a member of the Folio Society Devotees and we have many threads there which contain images, which is excellent, but lots of images in a thread does sometimes make it slow to load. As the purpose of this group is image sharing, then just using the threads themselves may be problematic - please do let us know if you feel that this won't necessarily be the case.

I wanted to have something available for the group launch, and considered some alternatives:

A new, dedicated, Weebly site - free, but unwieldy for multiple people to use
Photobucket - incessant advertising
Flickr Group - not possible to create albums or organise images by themes, and I'm hoping that the discussion part will take place here rather than there

So, the solution I came up with was to open up a new personal Flickr account for the use of this group. https://www.flickr.com/photos/135703194@N04/ Anyone can view images on there but I will pm group members the log-in to allow uploads. I've added some images, albums and galleries all thematically arranged, just to get us started.

Again, please do let us know if you have a better alternative than this.

>1 HuxleyTheCat: That sounds like a very sensible solution Fiona. As one of the most guilty offenders on FSD, I nevertheless completely agree that photo-heavy threads are a pain to load and reload, especially for hi-res images.

I'm with Count Fly--I am also an offender and think the Flicker solution is much better.

Love the Group Picture, and will check out the flickr account now. I read through the FS threads heavy on images (the multiple Tolkien threads come to mind), and agree they did tend to load slowly.

>1 HuxleyTheCat:

So, the solution I came up with was to open up a new personal Flickr account for the use of this group. ... Anyone can view images on there but I will pm group members the log-in to allow uploads.

I've only recently created a flickr account, and used it only to view a dedicated thread over the summer. My experience there primarily was viewing, and marking specific images as favourites, but no uploading on my side. My novice question then: Is then there a way to contribute photos to one flickr account, using another? Or must we always log in to the account to which we want to contribute a specific image?

>5 elenchus: "Is then there a way to contribute photos to one flickr account, using another? Or must we always log in to the account to which we want to contribute a specific image?"

From what I've been able to ascertain, one has to be logged in to the account in order to upload an image - I'm happy to be corrected on that if anyone knows different - so all the images in the photostream and albums would be contributed by Flickr-user literary_lens, with one exception, galleries, which are there to showcase favourite images from other users, but, you would have to be logged-in to the literary_lens account to pull images into a gallery.

I've sent you the log-in details, so please do have a play about with it and see what you think.

Hi folks. You could just create a Flickr group. That way people can have individual accounts to upload to then add to the group. The group can also host conversations if you like. Just a thought.

Um, Bookmarque - this seems like it would work, but can you explain -- Can I use my existing Flickr account and move photos over to the group? I believe that is one question we have, can we have our photos in another flickr page and somehow move certain ones of them to this Group page?

Groups operate as separate entities from user accts. and once you join a group you can post any photo you like to it. Admins and moderators can delete photos that don't fit the theme, and you can make the group private if you want. You can put all your photos in as many or as few groups as you like. Make sense?

This is me there - https://www.flickr.com/photos/thewiresmith/

Click on any image to see how many groups it is in.

>7 Bookmarque: >8 SteveJohnson:
This is how the Folio Society group on Flickr works.
I have photos on my personal Flickr page that I can transfer to the FS group without logging in specifically once I have been accepted as a member of the group.
The FS group page is at:-
https://www.flickr.com/groups/1041090@N25/

I agree, a flickr group would save us having to log into a special account. You can make it private so that only invited members can post, or you can keep it public but put restrictions on the number of posts per day/week/month, or monitor photos before they are admitted, and so on.

When I looked at the option of creating a group flickr account, these were the negatives which I saw:

"Flickr Group - not possible to create albums or organise images by themes, and I'm hoping that the discussion part will take place here rather than there"

As far as I could see there isn't a mechanism for organising photographs into albums - overthemoon, I think you confirmed this on the FSd forum when I queried it as I have no prior experience of using groups on Flickr, so I wasn't aware if there were options which I wasn't seeing. That being the case, how do we organise images within the group Flickr page? If all the images go into one big pot, how do we organise them if we have several thematic things going on?

ETA - Please do have a look at the page which I have set up https://www.flickr.com/photos/135703194@N04/albums (you don't have to be logged in to do so) and particularly have a look at the Albums tab and also Galleries (under 'More') to see the sort of thematic organisation which I am describing, if you then compare this to the Folio Society group page, https://www.flickr.com/groups/1041090@N25/ you will see the big differences.

One of the thoughts which came from the Macy forum was that we could have a thread for photographic illustrations for novels, as Arion Press sometimes use them (Hound of the Baskervilles) or the LEC have (The Old Man and the Sea). Personally I would love to see how photographers would tackle illustrating something like Wuthering Heights, or The Wind in the Willows. If we were to start a thread like that, members could create an Album within the literary lens page to show their images, whereas if we have a group account, those images will just be part of one big pool and I would imagine will make little sense.

The only way is to have discussion threads for images. All photos just go into the group stream and are arranged in chronological order, latest first.

>12 HuxleyTheCat: Thanks Barbara, our posts crossed in the ether :)

#12, I think you can do that with tags on Flickr within the group, but it would still be in a mass. If that's a need than only a shared login will work, but not for me or anyone else with severe bandwidth restrictions. I can barely get my stuff loaded to my acct once a week at the library.

I think a dedicated Flickr is a great idea for this group, as it will group them all in one place. To supplement, I'll also add that Imgur is a incredibly easy way to upload and share pictures, if you just want to share them quickly (you don't even need an account).

Sorry to have taken a while to sort this out folks, but I've just created a Flickr Group so that those of you who wish to can upload your images to that. I see it as complimentary to the Main Flickr Page, which I hope will be used for projects/themes.

https://www.flickr.com/groups/2898336@N21/

At the moment it is completely open, so we'll see how it goes - we can make it member only if we start getting any issues.

I just tried to upload a picture to the "books" album but I may have inadvertently made it the banner image for the album instead.

>18 aaronpepperdine: No problem Aaron, I think Album banners are selected randomly or latest image uploaded, it doesn't affect the main site at all.

What's the book?

It's Persephone, designed by Bruce Rogers and printed by William Rudge. It's primarily interesting because (I believe) it is the first use of the gold roundels Rogers later used to illustrated his wonderful Odyssey.

>20 aaronpepperdine: Talking of which: http://booksandvines.com/2015/09/14/the-odyssey-by-homer-bruce-rogers-emery-walk...

I've just taken delivery of a book which has a little bit of gold highlighting, which was a very pleasant surprise: it's the Braun privately printed edition of An Iceland Fisherman. Will try and see if I can get some nice images of the title page.

ETA - I've uploaded an image of the title page for the Braun edition of An Iceland Fisherman to the Flickr site - I've added all the 'book' shots from the main site to the Group page as well, to hopefully encourage others ;-)