Houston we got a ...

[DaveKile]

Well it is not a problem yet, but will be an issue if I don't deal with it soon.

The site as we use is about five years old. We provide the ability to for folks to imbed photos into the posts. You can imagine there are a lot of pictures. To give you an idea it is actually over 10,000 and I think closer to 15,000. I can only see the first 9, 998 in the directory.
There were 4,000 pictures posted in 2010 alone.

These pictures take a lot of space and for a variety of reasons I can't keep them all forever. I will have to make some changes going forward. I have a few options and may need to do more than one:

1. Delete old posts (not sure if the photos go away as well)
2. Limit what people can post in the way of photos- size ect.
3. Delete just the photo's older then a certain date, but keep the posts. Text would be there, but no photo.

A am leaning towards deleting old pictures in posts. #3 For example I would delete everything from 2008 and older. I want to keep the posts, but some day I may have to start trimming those as well.

Feedback and awareness would be great.

 

[jayL]

I would say #3 is most reasonable.

Personally, I wouldn't allow any attaching of photos. There are enough sites out there to host the photos, that there's no need for PAFF to do so.

I'd make a big push to get people to use something like www.imgur.com and do a clear tutorial on remotely hosting and embedding images in posts that way. IMO, it's much nicer to post the photos inline in something like a report than it is to have them attached at the bottom anyway.

Can you outright disable attachments in posts? I would trim them back to an acceptable point, then stop accepting them going forward.

I would consider deleting of posts to be the least desirable solution, by far. Deleting old information dooms us to rehashing the same subjects over and over again, which is not appealing to us long time regulars. We have enough of it as it stands.

 

[gfen]

dkile wrote:
2. Limit what people can post in the way of photos- size ect.
3. Delete just the photo's older then a certain date, but keep the posts. Text would be there, but no photo.

#3 for sure. Especially since alot of that stuff is garbage. Its unreasonable to be a photohost for people, but its nice that you do it. It does make images easier to insert.

As for #2, maybe lower maximum size or amount of attachments for a short term, and make a point there's a yearly purge. Again, you shouldn't be a photohost.

 

[pcray1231]

I used to imbed photos from hosting sites. But often, I have trouble getting this site to handle the size correctly.

When I post photos to photobucket, they're usually full size. This site has a function to allow you to shrink them, but its buggy and doesn't always work right.

So, I either shrink a handful of photos and post them as attachments. Or for bigger strings, I post the photobucket link.

 

[albatross]

I like Jay's idea of doing a clear tutorial for a simple remote photo hosting service. You could give people a few months notice that this will be the only way to embed photos moving forward (remote hosted in general, not just the site in the tutorial).

 

[franklin]

#3 works best

 

[jayL]

pcray1231 wrote:
I used to imbed photos from hosting sites. But often, I have trouble getting this site to handle the size correctly.

When I post photos to photobucket, they're usually full size. This site has a function to allow you to shrink them, but its buggy and doesn't always work right.

So, I either shrink a handful of photos and post them as attachments. Or for bigger strings, I post the photobucket link.

Upload to imgur, hover over "image options" on the top-right, and hit "edit".

Make sure "lock proportions" is checked, and edit height or width.

imgur is superior to photobucket, imo.

 

[Fishidiot]

Set up the OT forum to delete all photos posted there after a week or two (won't be much of a loss).

Regarding worthwhile content in the regular forums and the Photos section, if there's a mechanism to reduce them to very small size after, say, twelve months....this would preserve the historic integrity of Paflyfish.com. If photos disappear from the forums it will harm much of the site's historical integrity and make many of the threads unintelligible or otherwise worthless.

 

[DaveKile]

FI,

I need to check in with you on what you did there. Let me know if you are around for a call on this.

Dave