Saint-Archives.com Forum

Hi Adam.

Firstly I would like to stress my appreciation to you and Venizelos for the great work you have done in compiling the catalogue of Silvia's photos. I especially thank Venizelos for the enormous amount of work he has put into organising and maintaining the web site. It is an invaluable resource for fellow collectors like myself.

Regarding the points you make, I have a few comments:

I agree the thumbnails are too small. Slightly larger would help identify differences between potential new pictures and existing ones in the catalogue. But make them too big and we have possible copyright issues.

Reordering the pictures in each set would be an enormously laborious task and I doubt the benefits would justify the workload. However, if forum members were able to submit new ordering for specific sets for approval, then we may be able to delegate that work amongst the group. It is not clear how many of us would be willing to participate in such an effort though.

I agree it would be helpful to provide notes on the provenance of photo sets when the information is readily available. Indeed many of the sets do have some indication of the source albeit very brief. However, it would be too much of a burden to require all photos to be exhaustively researched before they are worthy of inclusion in the catalogue. Not all of us have your extraordinary attention to detail or record-keeping ability.

How would you propose to present the information? Some sets are made up of photos from many different sources, so it would be difficult to identify which images were from which source unless some additional levels of structure were put in place within each set. Alternatively, EXIF tagging may be an option, but that would be another hugely laborious task.

On the other hand, I tend to agree with Venizelos that it's not the various publications of photographs that are being catalogued, but it is the general image. In other words, it's the same photo if it is exactly the same content, irrespective of the resolution, logos, color balance, etc. How that fits with recording provenance would be open to debate.

For my own part, the other thing I would like to see would be some alternative indexing to make it easier to locate a specific set. I have lost count of the number of times I have laboriously paged through the catalogue back and forth trying to find a set I know is there but can't quite find. So much so that I ended up writing a small Android app to use as my own index. This is based on various levels of categorisation, e.g. Solo/Suze/Set384, Hardcore/Movies/Private/Set417, etc. Something similar could be done for the diosasuprema.es web site using cgi scripting with an XML index or just as a static table of contents. I stress that I am not suggesting changing set numbers, just having an alternative way of locating sets.

Spike

Creo que ya lo he dicho alguna vez, pero lo comento para tener una aclaración.

Aparte de Silvia también son fan de Veronika Zemanova, y digo esto porque la idea del catálogo surgió precisamente porque veronika en aquellos tiempos ya tenía un foro y un catálogo con sus imágenes, así que me puse el reto de crear uno propio para Silvia Saint y que todos pudiéramos tener una referencia donde guiarnos. Esto me supuso un enorme trabajo considerando la gran cantidad de imágenes existentes  y todo sea dicho, mi nulo o poco conocimiento de creación de páginas web.

Con el tiempo el catálogo de Veronika ha evolucionado mejorando en su organización y estructura, los cual seria precisamente mi objetivo, pero dada mi falta de conocimientos sobre creación de web, lo veo complicado.

Os dejo el enlace al catálogo para que podáis ver exactamente cual es su estructura y toda la información disponible, que engloba precisamente muchas de las sugerencias aquí planteadas.

http://www.veronika-zemanova.info/Index/photos.php@page=1.html

Respecto a la resolución de las viñetas, no creo que sea necesario aumentar su tamaño, ya que esto implicaría una enerome reestructuración y espacio adicional en el alojamiento. Creo que si tenemos nuestro catálogo con las imágenes a su tamaño original, no supone ningún problema de comparación para saber si una imagen es nueva.
Con esto no quiero decir que sea una decisión definitiva.

Coincido plenamente en que dada la gran cantidad de sets, es complicado encontrar la ubicación donde pertenecen las nuevas imágenes, incluso sabiendo que el set está incluido dentro del catálogo.

I think I have said it before, but I comment it for clarification.

Apart from Silvia they are also a fan of Veronika Zemanova, and I say this because the idea of ??the catalog arose precisely because veronika in those days already had a forum and a catalog with her images, so I set myself the challenge of creating one of my own for Silvia Saint and that we could all have a reference to guide us. This was a huge job for me considering the large number of existing images, all of which are my no or little knowledge of creating web pages.

Over time, Veronika's catalog has evolved, improving its organization and structure, which would be precisely my objective, but given my lack of knowledge about web creation, I find it complicated.

I leave you the link to the catalog so that you can see exactly what its structure is and all the information available, which includes many of the suggestions made here.

http://www.veronika-zemanova.info/Index/photos.php@page\u003d1.html

Regarding the resolution of the bullets, I do not think it is necessary to increase their size, since this would imply a major restructuring and additional space in the accommodation. I think that if we have our catalog with the images at their original size, it is not a comparison problem to know if an image is new.
By this I do not mean that it is a final decision.

I fully agree that given the large number of sets, it is difficult to find the location where the new images belong, even knowing that the set is included in the catalog.

-- Edited by Venizelos on Wednesday 6th of May 2020 10:28:43 AM

That does look like a sensible format for additional notes on each photo set.  It's still very close to what Venizelos has constructed.  However, it's still unstructured for search purposes.

So who is volunteering to write 875 summaries/notes for each set?    (Not to mention the public appearance and casting sets).

Another random thought:

For comparison purposes, is there any merit in providing MD5/SHA1/SHA256 hashes for each photo?   I use MD5 hashes to weed out duplicates from my collection, but it would be handy to have hashes for all the catalogue "reference" photos to identify which ones we actually have (and therefore which ones we are missing).  Although, on second thoughts, if we have multiple versions of each photo with different logos/resolutions, we'd need many different hashes for the same base image.  Perhaps still possible, but a lot of work again.

That seems to be a recurring theme: a lot of work. 

Spike

Ah Tomcalover, you contributed as us all to improve the catalog, and I remember you even sent me thousands folders to check some years ago. So that's me who thank you.

For image collectors, our thoughts about improving catalog may seem unnecessary and Spike posted the most important comment of all : it needs a lot of time.

In a few days or weeks, I'm aware i will not have much to give to this forum but I hope we could begin something new, whatever time it takes, ... even years, it's not a problem.

We only have to find a way to collect contributions of everyone interested. I think a new topic for each set of the catalog is a pure madness but perhaps a single topic with 825 empty posts is a solution.

The problem is only moderators can edit posts and complete. Am I wrong ?

Only martiner as the owner can create such a new subforum, but it's easy. If he logs in here, he has on the "Main Page" below the existing subforums a button named "Create Forum".

Greetings
Bernd

spike wrote:

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The 875 empty posts in a single topic won't work for the reason you suggest: only moderators or the original poster (OP) can change existing posts.

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What we as moderators can do is giving a particular user the right to edit other users' comments, either for all 4 resp. 5 subforums, or only for a certain subforum.

This would make another class of users, with rights between those of ordinary users and our own rights as moderators, similar to the "reviewers" in Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reviewing_pending_changes ), who stand between ordinary registered users (with account older then some days) and admins. But this right should be given only on request, not to any forum user. And I don't know how cumbersome a reconstruction would become if some day one of these privileged users ran amok and blanked all threads in the subforum.

Greetings
Bernd

Question : who is interested ? Spike, Venizelos, Bernd and me... if we are only 4, all moderators, I come back with my idea of a single topic with +800 empty posts. Another topic could be created for others contributions

adamtomcalova wrote:

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Question : who is interested ? Spike, Venizelos, Bernd and me... if we are only 4, all moderators, I come back with my idea of a single topic with +800 empty posts. Another topic could be created for others contributions

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If this separation in two subforums is intended then of course we can build it like this.
If not, then it could be difficult here in the forum. I think for a long-time project with many corrections of existing threads (I would call it an iterative project) Activeboard is not the right platform, a Wiki-like platform would be more appropriate for this purpose. Also because it keeps all old page versions, so one amok running user cannot do much harm.

I am here more a consumer than a creator in the fields of scanning and catalog construction. Essentially because it is too time intensive for me if pursued seriously. So you would be rather 3 than 4 workers in the topic with the +800 posts.

Greetings
Bernd

Bernd,

Thanks for input. 

Here are my further thoughts:

1) Thumbnails: while bigger is better I agree with Venizelos that the benefit from increasing the size is outweighed by the storage requirements, as the disk size increases by roughly the square of the image size. I find the current size adequate to establish a match and will normally confirm this by referring to the full-size image in my collection (or not, if I don't have it).  The current size is highly unlikely to be deemed copyright infringement under the "Fair dealing" exclusion.

2) Tags: I agree that tagging is a much better way of searching content than having a monolithic index structure.  Users will generally just type in random stuff and hope there are tags for what the provide.  There's no great problem if the tags list grows unless you want to provide a pick list of tags (like in StackOverflow).  If so, you could always tag your tags. .  The index I have already made myself may be a useful starting point for creating a list of tags.

3) Hashes: MD5 hashes are VERY useful and I manage my collection with them. It would be great if the catalogue provided them.  

I've also been using perceptual hashes (phash and dhash) with my recent scans to give me candidates for potential matches of similar but non-identical images and was  This is how social media providers try to filter copyright infringements and indecent images.  This tackles the issue of the same photo having different resolutions (as with my scans) and minor branding differences, so would also be useful to have for the catalogue.  There are very few off-the-shelf tools that do this for you though, in fact none that I could find, so I had to write a script around a Python library that I came across.

Spike