Reviews with pictures

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

Hey its the 21'st century Everybody else is just doing plain text reviews. You guys get books and products straight from the manufacturers. Could we ask if photos or excerpts can be used in the review if they dont give away any serious mechanics...?

Just brainstorming...
Jeffe

[Spriggan]

This is about the 4th time this topic has poped up and while most of us agree it would be nice we've never been able to work out a system that would work the way we wanted.  Maybe if we start up out weekly meetings again we'd hammer something out.  

[Mr_Pleasington]

Well, for now, if you just wanted to put a picture of me in place of a product picture I think it would serve as a good placeholder.

Might get some more ladies around here too  

[42]

Sprig is right we have tried numerous time to get picts with reviews. As I remember, the past complaints have been:
1. coding for picts,
2. lack of people knowing how to prep picts and having time to prep them,
3. getting the picts to mesh with the site design,
4. copyright issues,
5. figuring out a system of submitting and uploading images.

[Fellfrosch]

Numbers 3 and 4 aren't as serious, but that pretty much sums it up. Pictures are awesome, and if anyone wants to be the graphics prep man I'll hire you on the spot, but it's a lot of work and thus far we simply haven't had anyone with the time to do it.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

what do you use for your page out of curiosity?

[Spriggan]

PHP.
One more that Tage just informed me of is that our bandwith has been cut by more then half.  So if we do upload pictues and the site gets more popular that will cause a problem.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

Half ? wow that sucks. Well yopu could just do pics for the initial article and then drop them after a week, But then again...

[Spriggan]

Right now it wont cause much of a problem, it more of an if we get a lot more popular.  Of course if that happens Fell would probaly find some way to generate some revinue and we could probaly pay for more bandwith.  But Tage just told me this yesterday.

[Fellfrosch]

I suppose I could stop paying people to carry me around, and use that money to buy more bandwidth...but I don't think my poor feet could handle it. They've grown accostomed to never feeling the unholy caress of carpet.

[Tage]

LOL, I love how Spriggan just pulls stuff out of his cornhole.

I said I have to downgrade the server. I will have *less* bandwidth and space available, but I didn't say by how much, and it won't impact TWG at all.

[Spriggan]

you told me half last night

[Entsuropi]

Ok. Here it goes. At home, i have, at the last count, 3 digital cameras, 2 flatbed scanners and 3 pro level image programs.

So, if i were to, say, review a RPG i could not only scan the front and back (and the spine - could show what teh entire cover looks like in one continuous pic) but could take digi snaps of inside pages. This shows how nice the cover is and what the inside of the book is like.

I think that the easiest way of making pictures work is to simply store them on the server and use HTML code to link them as [img] type thingies.

Any comments?

[Tage]

Covers are probably okay, but be VERY careful when taking shots of inside the book. If any text contents are legible, we could possibly get sued for copyright infringement.

One good way to prevent this from happening, though, is to write and submit the review, but not have Fell post it publicly until it's been approved by the copyright holders. That way, you could even get text in there, as long as the company agreed with sharing that information.

[Fellfrosch]

It would be easier to just not take internal shots. I don't think we'd be missing much. Also, I think an entire pic of both covers and the spine is sort of overkill.