Main site - lots of new images are being added to the KLOV encyclopedia

mclemore

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The bad news, and 2500 pieces of of good news.

The bad news is that for much of the last six months, the image upload feature has been turned off (along with add-a-game and related features). And the really bad news is that the brief time it has been (mistakenly) up, it hasn't worked right. So any one that did try to upload an image this year... let's just say the image didn't get properly saved. Simply put...ugg.. And of course we've had a backlog of submitted images for years.

The good news is that after a long break, the images are coming online now. In all, I approved over 2,500 images in the last 3 days that are all online now. In case you are wondering, that is about 1/4 of the queue backlog. If you are curious what machines got images added, a real-time list can be found here: https://www.arcade-museum.com/news/

Previously, if an image was approved, it would then go to an image editor that would crop out the background and re-upload it, for final review and addition to the site. Our previously (paid) image cropper didn't want the work any more, but we had a larger issue. A huge percentage of upload images were not suited for image cropping -- typically because either some object was on or in front of a game, or because some of the game extended over the edges of the images, or maybe for some other reason the images were just bad. It also took a lot of work to decide whether or not to accept a 'marginal' image. Often, a marginal image is all we had of a game however.

Another issue had to deal with image moderators. The process took an hour or two to learn, and most volunteers got tired of volunteering around the time they learned the system. The system really worked better with a few moderators that were pretty dedicated, while what we had here generally were a large number of volunteers willing to put a little time into the system, but not much. Let's just say we are in the process of re-envisioning the system. It's an ongoing process that will likely take several more months to came together. It's time for some baby steps though.

Two days ago I changed the system so that an image could be approved and by-pass the image editor. In the database, it would be noted that it isn't edited, in case we want to clean up images in the future.

The current site automatically resizes them the way it wants (and picks different sizes for different size images actually). A few months after we launch the new system, we will likely change image sizes, and may move to an thumbnail -> larger-image-available setup. For now images sizes remain the same. I had the system add a watermark to each image (you can tell images added beginning this week because of a 'KLOV' stamp on each one). Note neither the image dimensions nor the watermark are intended to be final. The system has saved the vast majority of the original images so they can be reprocessed later this year as we continue to work on the site. Long term, we'll probably have some type of (more) subtle watermark on images, with an ability for people to download an image without a watermark if they have a reason to. I'm primarily concerned about other sites that leach images off of here, not one at a time, but thousands at a time...

It's nice seeing a lot of pages of obscure games that previously had no images (and basically no game description of note) begin to bulk up a bit.

Not all images in the queue that I looked at I approved. I did approve a lot of marginal images though. It is my hope that breathing some new life into the project will help encourage people to upload more images (including upgraded images to replace some of our poor ones) once the submit features are back online... In any case, I think it is really helpful to people considering uploading images to see what we have already as it can help prevent some duplicate submissions (including where we have a great image in queue, and then someone uploads a vastly inferior version later because they don't know we already have a decent image).

Happy Memorial Day Weekend...


Note: If you look the 'news' page, the earliest image uploaded was an image for Zap. When we uploaded it, the picture rotated. This had to deal with meta tags in the image that told a view to rotate the image at hand. We weren't looking for such, and most images don't do this. Enough do however. We modified the code to handle auto-rotation now, but there were a half dozen or so images processed at the start of the process on Wednesday that we will have to redo...
 
Happy Memorial Day to everyone here in the U.S. And happy More Images Day too. Another 1000 images were added to the main encyclopedia over the weekend, bringing the total up to 3,500 added in the last week.

Progress from this point forward will slow down, but we'll try to add at least a few hundred a week during the month of June.
 
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