You may have already noticed a recent addition to the photo detail pages.  In the upper right of the screen are 10 images that are related to the main picture you’re looking at.  You’ll see two to three images at first, but if you move your mouse over them, it’ll start to scroll to the left or right.  The closer your mouse is to the left or right edge will control the speed in which it scrolls.  If you move your mouse to the center or off the pictures, it will stop scrolling.

Underneath these images is a list of tags that are related to the main photo’s subject.  By clicking one of these links, you’ll go to a gallery full of images related to that word.  The ‘most popular’ gallery tags have been removed from the image pages in favor of displaying the tags that are actually related to that picture.

I also cleaned up the galleries so that they’ll show pictures that are more related to the subject.  If you were looking at the lion gallery, you also saw images for dandelions because the word “lion” shows up in the flower’s name.  It’s now looking for full words instead of partial words.

Additionally, I reworked the related words system to give more weight to the keywords the member enters in as well as their description of the photo.  The highest weighted element is still the image’s title, so it’s a good idea to make sure the title, keyword field, and description all contain 2-3 descriptive words of your photo.  If you name your image “Yellow Spatterdock Mountain Pond Lilly”, be sure to use that phrase or parts of it in your keyword and description fields to ensure that the system will pick up the most important words and leave out the more generic stuff.  In this case, longer descriptions tend to be better than shorter ones.  The related tags list is rebuilt each night from all of the page’s content.

Also, a little while ago, I gave more weight to the voting scores that are available from each of the photo detail pages when you’re logged in.  The overall score of each picture helps determine its placement within the gallery pages.  The score is based on things like the number of comments, the number of visitors that have viewed that picture, the average votes, and a few other factors.  However, keep in mind that there are many checks in place to prevent somebody from cheating the voting system.  The scores are rebuilt each night along with the keyword lists, so you won’t notice any immediate changes to an image’s position within the galleries.

Spring is here and now is a great time to add all of your nature photographs as well as your wildlife, flower, architectural, portraits, and other photos to your galleries.  Remember, free members can upload 500 images, and for a small fee, you can upgrade that to 1000 or unlimited images.

Tags: announcements, photo gallery

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 10:31 am and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.