Photo of the Day and Splash Page Discussion

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Hey Guys,

Just wanted to post a thread in here to open up discussion on Photo of the Day and the Splash Page. A few of you guys have some questions regarding how photos get picked, what dimensions your photos need to have to be selected, as well as some comments regarding the splash page. So lets use this thread to condense information!
 
12993975:cydwhit said:
How do photos get picked?

Ultra top secret equation that has something like (upvotes+views+comments)/(time+downvotes) and it must be a HUGE photo.

Also I have to agree with SDrvper on the issue of the splash page... I really miss the old one.
 
12994167:john18061806 said:
it must be a HUGE photo.

Jamie, correct me on this if I am wrong, but i know it has to be at least 1000px wide. Most photographers photos end up being MUCH larger (roughly 3000x2000 or so) unless cropped down
 
12993796:SDrvper said:
I guess ill start

I do not like the new Potd page as much as the old one

Why: half of the photos you have to wait for it to scroll to the middle, on the old one, you could be on the page for 2 seconds and see the photo

However, i like how there is a drop down stuff on the left.

A mixture of the new and old page would be awesome, but cant please everyone!

We *might* have something that is going to be a nice balance between the old and the new. The new one fucking sucks and we've realized that, so we've got a change coming down the pipe I think you'll like.
 
12994838:Krotch said:
Jamie, correct me on this if I am wrong, but i know it has to be at least 1000px wide. Most photographers photos end up being MUCH larger (roughly 3000x2000 or so) unless cropped down

I think the width has to be much wider than 1000px, which confused me when a photo of mine wasn't picked but both dimensions were over 1000px. I'll let Doug/Jason give us specifics.
 
13002586:SDrvper said:
That sounds good to me.

I think that the key burns thingys or whatever they are called are the main issue. Its nice to just be able to see the photo right off the bat

I like the bigger NEWSCHOOLERS on the new page though

Editing post because we launched it.

Now everyone can see it, so go check it out and let us know what you think!

SD - please do post screen capture.

**This post was edited on May 23rd 2014 at 2:11:42pm
 
13002600:SDrvper said:
That is better i think. so nice how its plain, chill and you see potd, votd and i "notd" (news) im on macbook pro on safari and i cant scroll down so all i see the NEW SCHOO and i cant go down. I took a screenshot but dont know if i should post it in this thread incase its a secret

Ah never mind we found it. Fix incoming...
 
bug: when moving my browser window smaller than ~1000px wide, the potd just disappears and im left with that NS background only
 
13002610:Walter.1337 said:
bug: when moving my browser window smaller than ~1000px wide, the potd just disappears and im left with that NS background only

Yeah small bug - addressing.
 
13002617:SDrvper said:
Still have this bug, not sure if you did it yet.

Also did you remove the potd and the "notd" now? My page is just a photo with newschoolers at the bottom right.

But the photo is dope af, it 1337's i think.

Refresh your cache and the scroll bars will work. Nothing else is ripped out.

The disappearing thing is a touch harder, we're working on it. Those little bugs will be addressed within 30 minutes or something like that as we catch them.

The main question is - do you like the concept?

Wait until a vertical photo comes up its pretty cool what we did.
 
13002636:SDrvper said:
oh that bottom bar is fucking sick

i really like that now. if that was the layout for now i would be completely happy

the only thing is that the right left looks kinda boring, maybe add something small there. looks WAY better like that.

wonder what it *might* look like with a vertical photo

It appears that your screen grab above got the test version. :)
 
13002659:pussyfooter said:
New page looks great guys! I like it a lot

You'll like the vertical one better. As you can see in the image above, we solved the vertical photo issue by adding a big news of the day and video of the day module. This will mean that when its a vertical photo, our journalists and producers are going to get some mega love.
 
13002697:Mr.Bishop said:
Also... eheath pleased on first pass?

I'll consider that a mega win. ;)

thumbs-up-computer-kid-gif.gif
 
So what I understand is that photos with 1000px min it cannot make cover? That seems silly to me especially since I do not post above that on the net because of many issues I've had with images getting stolen and other infringement issues.
 
13002824:RileySnyderPhoto said:
So what I understand is that photos with 1000px min it cannot make cover? That seems silly to me especially since I do not post above that on the net because of many issues I've had with images getting stolen and other infringement issues.

Well the bottom line is that resolutions are getting bigger and this spot needs a photo that big to go into it. If we were to take smaller we'd have to stretch it or make the size different. Not going to work, bottom line.

We had a bit of a hiatus of the photographer monetization program on the site this year, but that was only temporary. You guys are still going to get paid for getting into the yearbook, and next year we have all the programs launched and solid so you'll be able to make cash off the photo views.

Anyway - the idea is to give a better place for the obit it's to express themselves, and contribute to a more developed system that we can build off the monetization side of things.
 
To be honest I didn't even know NS had a splash page. I always just used my favourites to open NS so I don't know if the knew splash page is better or worse but I can tell you this, it looks sick.
 
13003123:Mr.Bishop said:
Well the bottom line is that resolutions are getting bigger and this spot needs a photo that big to go into it. If we were to take smaller we'd have to stretch it or make the size different. Not going to work, bottom line.

We had a bit of a hiatus of the photographer monetization program on the site this year, but that was only temporary. You guys are still going to get paid for getting into the yearbook, and next year we have all the programs launched and solid so you'll be able to make cash off the photo views.

I don't think that is the bottom line at all. Changing the minimum resolution will have a great impact, and it's imperative to tell us photographers what resolution our photos need to be, sounds pretty simple to me. The lack of clarity has already caused confusion and missed POTD's for photographer like Jamie and myself.

The issue of image security is also very important to address. Like Riley, I don't post images online greater than 1000px on the long side, for image security. There would have to be a large incentive for me to do otherwise, because dealing with stolen images sucks.

As for the photographers program, thanks for telling us about the monetization, or lack thereof.... oh wait, definitely was never told that. The lack of transparency and communication has been really poor, but that's a discussion for another time and place.
 
13003412:Sklar said:
I don't think that is the bottom line at all. Changing the minimum resolution will have a great impact, and it's imperative to tell us photographers what resolution our photos need to be, sounds pretty simple to me. The lack of clarity has already caused confusion and missed POTD's for photographer like Jamie and myself.

The issue of image security is also very important to address. Like Riley, I don't post images online greater than 1000px on the long side, for image security. There would have to be a large incentive for me to do otherwise, because dealing with stolen images sucks.

I can understand where you want the photos big Doug but so do the people that steal our images. Honestly it isn't worth the risk to be posting that large for the chance of POTD which may or may not bring a few more views. The program has a bit of a way to go to get me to post photos at higher resolution without watermarking and precautions taken against unauthorized use. The majority of people I know rarely see images on anything higher than a 1080p screen and with viewing a 3:2 ration image, there wont be a way to have full screen without cropping or adding bars and usually keeping the size down decreases the load time.
 
I found this thread anticlimactic.

An archive of front-pages would be appreciated. (In a flip style cataloging would be even doper.)
 
To be honest, the new splash page feels very 2008-ish...or at least it does when viewing it on a 24" 1080 monitor. I don't necessarily mind the layout, but I think the design just really need to be responsive...I want the info box to fill my screen completely so I can see the image as big as possible.

Also something that bothers me....when I click the photo, logically it should take me to the picture's page and not the home page. It made more sense when the image took up the entirety of the view in the last version (not that I found that to be a good solution).

But most importantly is if you are going to continue to use user provided content on the homepage, and you incentives up to post out pictures by having us on content teams and monetizing us by the number of views, you NEED to start counting home page views in to the number of photo views.
 
The data actually suggests that there was only a certain point in time where home page views where counted towards pictures views:
qqZbbts.jpg
 
13004610:Ito said:
But most importantly is if you are going to continue to use user provided content on the homepage, and you incentives up to post out pictures by having us on content teams and monetizing us by the number of views, you NEED to start counting home page views in to the number of photo views.

Yes the splash page used to count views on pictures and they would get around 30'000-50'000 views.

Now that there is the monetizing program, the money has to come from somewhere and unfortunately there isn't any ads on the splash page, therefore you views on your picture doesn't actually generate any money for NS.

But I like this new splash page, it's clean and simple.
 
13002824:RileySnyderPhoto said:
So what I understand is that photos with 1000px min it cannot make cover? That seems silly to me especially since I do not post above that on the net because of many issues I've had with images getting stolen and other infringement issues.

For those worrying about your image being stolen, use a watermark -- nothing stops you from doing so, and it means even more exposure for you and your brand.

Also, who is stealing your images and for what purpose? Can you provide an example? And why wouldn't they steal it if it was 900px wide instead of say, 1280px wide? Would they still steal it with a watermark? I'm just curious because a bunch of photographers do share their high res online.

http://www.erikseo.com

http://www.russelldalby.com

http://www.grantgunderson.com

http://jussigrznar.com
[URL]http://www.adamclarkphoto.com/


[/url]http://brunolong.com/

http://www.willwissman.com/

http://garrettgrove.com/

13003412:Sklar said:
As for the photographers program, thanks for telling us about the monetization, or lack thereof....

Sklar, yeah it sucks that the photo program didn't run this winter -- but remember the year it did? IMO it was a total disaster and the system was completely flawed as one member took advantage of it and completely screwed the rest of them.

Also note we sent and paid our top rated journalist from the past year to Sochi to cover the Olympics on our behalf, which put a huge dent in our content budgets.

At the moment, one Yearbook spread will net you more than each photographer made with the photo program when it ran, and IMO that's some decent incentive. With that being said, the program will be making a comeback next year.
 
13005234:Mousseau said:
For those worrying about your image being stolen, use a watermark -- nothing stops you from doing so, and it means even more exposure for you and your brand.

Also, who is stealing your images and for what purpose? Can you provide an example? And why wouldn't they steal it if it was 900px wide instead of say, 1280px wide? Would they still steal it with a watermark? I'm just curious because a bunch of photographers do share their high res online.

http://www.erikseo.com

http://www.russelldalby.com

http://www.grantgunderson.com

http://jussigrznar.com
[URL]http://www.adamclarkphoto.com/


[/url]http://brunolong.com/

http://www.willwissman.com/

http://garrettgrove.com/

Maybe it was just from a few years back when I was told not to watermark for anything used in articles. We obviously have changed since then. As for the long side I keep it at 1000 because it is less likely for someone to use an image in print 3 inches on the long side for monetary gain. The web is a different deal and two big ones that have used my images without permission for gain would be FD Wear and Bolle. I ran into this huge issue when I was the photo intern for Windells when they wanted no watermarks. I do watermark and did back then but they made me not do it for their web use which I understand. As for posting on their own site, that makes sense and mine will be higher resolution on my site too. I just limit it where I don't have control over it as much.
 
13005234:Mousseau said:
Sklar, yeah it sucks that the photo program didn't run this winter -- but remember the year it did? IMO it was a total disaster and the system was completely flawed as one member took advantage of it and completely screwed the rest of them.

Also note we sent and paid our top rated journalist from the past year to Sochi to cover the Olympics on our behalf, which put a huge dent in our content budgets.

At the moment, one Yearbook spread will net you more than each photographer made with the photo program when it ran, and IMO that's some decent incentive. With that being said, the program will be making a comeback next year.

Good to know, as a total noob to photography even this "non-program" has been really good. I'm stoked to hopefully participate again next year!
 
13005234:Mousseau said:
Sklar, yeah it sucks that the photo program didn't run this winter -- but remember the year it did? IMO it was a total disaster and the system was completely flawed as one member took advantage of it and completely screwed the rest of them.

Also note we sent and paid our top rated journalist from the past year to Sochi to cover the Olympics on our behalf, which put a huge dent in our content budgets.

At the moment, one Yearbook spread will net you more than each photographer made with the photo program when it ran, and IMO that's some decent incentive. With that being said, the program will be making a comeback next year.

Absolutely, the program was flawed and we all know that.

I have more thoughts, but I'll share those later and privately when I get the chance to put them into writing
 
13005181:joris.blanc said:
Yes the splash page used to count views on pictures and they would get around 30'000-50'000 views.

Now that there is the monetizing program, the money has to come from somewhere and unfortunately there isn't any ads on the splash page, therefore you views on your picture doesn't actually generate any money for NS.

But I like this new splash page, it's clean and simple.

It's up to NS to figure out how to monetize the website in the way they see fit - the people generating content should not take the hit because NS failed to figure out how to do so in an effective way. If those of us in the content creation programs are being paid based on how much that content is seen, it shouldn't matter as to what page it is seen on.

On that note, I honestly don't care about being paid for creating photo content. I don't know how other people in the content creation areas feel about this, but it certainly isn't a reason that I get out the camera.
 
13005513:RileySnyderPhoto said:
Maybe it was just from a few years back when I was told not to watermark for anything used in articles. We obviously have changed since then. As for the long side I keep it at 1000 because it is less likely for someone to use an image in print 3 inches on the long side for monetary gain. The web is a different deal and two big ones that have used my images without permission for gain would be FD Wear and Bolle. I ran into this huge issue when I was the photo intern for Windells when they wanted no watermarks. I do watermark and did back then but they made me not do it for their web use which I understand. As for posting on their own site, that makes sense and mine will be higher resolution on my site too. I just limit it where I don't have control over it as much.

Stuff in articles would be covered when we pay you for that stuff. I'd imagine that you got contracted by Jeff to cover something, and in that case yes he would ask for no watermarks and this would be part of that coverage contract. Anything you are contributing to the user-generated content pools on the site is completely yours to do with what you please. I think massive watermarks are dumb, but its completely up to you. You use those systems for whatever reason you wish, whether to work towards a monetized photo in the yearbook, work towards monetizing on Newschoolers or to self promote as a photographer.

Its a great issue to bring up about photo theft. Its a massive problem all across the internet - as is the problem that photographers don't realize their signing over the rights to their photos when they upload to services like Facebook and Instagram. Rights management is a disaster, and we all need to wake up and work towards a system that pushes compensation vs. paranoid hoarding of photos that never go anywhere.

Do you ever pirate software? Have you ever stolen music? Ever watched a pirated movie? If so, then you've done the same to other content creators and collectively we need a new model. The right answer isn't to hoard though and do nothing - we must face the new reality of an open sharing internet.

13005976:Sklar said:
Absolutely, the program was flawed and we all know that.

I have more thoughts, but I'll share those later and privately when I get the chance to put them into writing

Please, lets open up this discussion in the photographer cult. Exactly what its for. I've got great ideas for all three programs, and I think we can fix them up and have everything launch in a nice timely manner for next season.

13006198:Ito said:
It's up to NS to figure out how to monetize the website in the way they see fit - the people generating content should not take the hit because NS failed to figure out how to do so in an effective way. If those of us in the content creation programs are being paid based on how much that content is seen, it shouldn't matter as to what page it is seen on.

On that note, I honestly don't care about being paid for creating photo content. I don't know how other people in the content creation areas feel about this, but it certainly isn't a reason that I get out the camera.

MASSIVE mis-conception here. These programs are not direct payments for views, they are revenue share based off of advertising that runs on your content. We split the rev we make 50/50 with the content contributor - so when ads don't run on a page there is no rev split to be paid - just like we don't make any revenue off the page.

Also note, views on the Splash page do count. The difference is whether the splash page is displayed to all visitors by default or not - that what is accounting for the major discrepancies. Most of you guys probably have this setting chosen in your account so you never notice the difference. Note, just yesterday it was re-enabled by default so view counts will jump immensely.

Also finally the splash page views were paid last year. We put that in as an incentive and basically said the same logic - where we needed to figure out monetization and we wanted compensation for the guys who got the gold.

Do also note the biggest reason that the photography program was on hold this year is that photographers got paid the lions share of the yearbook contributor budget. Every time you put a photo in the system, its a contribution towards the yearbook and if you get in there you get paid pretty good. I admit, this was flawed overall logic, and something we'll address.
 
13003412:Sklar said:
I don't think that is the bottom line at all. Changing the minimum resolution will have a great impact, and it's imperative to tell us photographers what resolution our photos need to be, sounds pretty simple to me. The lack of clarity has already caused confusion and missed POTD's for photographer like Jamie and myself.

Here's what I don't understand -

Why is having that information directly within the upload form not enough information? I honestly don't know how to communicate it better, and need your assistance as to why you've never seen it before.

Look:

713740.png
 
13003412:Sklar said:
As for the photographers program, thanks for telling us about the monetization, or lack thereof.... oh wait, definitely was never told that. The lack of transparency and communication has been really poor, but that's a discussion for another time and place.

I take full responsibility for the piss poor communication that has come out of us this year. We had such immense changes to staffing, and took on some massive projects which led us into a dark hole of backlog. I didn't design the communication infrastructure correctly to make sure decisions were radiated outwards.

From here on in - we're assigning heads of each program who will be responsible for communicating what is happening. The cults (Photographer, Journalist and Producer) will be where all the internal discussions of people who are interested in joining up happen. We encourage you to pose questions if you see something out of place, and we'll do our best to make sure we're pushing information downward.

The good news for photogs as mentioned in a few other posts is that the photos are all still part of the Yearbook process, and you guys should get paid out pretty good for anything that makes it in there.
 
13006319:Mr.Bishop said:
MASSIVE mis-conception here. These programs are not direct payments for views, they are revenue share based off of advertising that runs on your content. We split the rev we make 50/50 with the content contributor - so when ads don't run on a page there is no rev split to be paid - just like we don't make any revenue off the page.

Also note, views on the Splash page do count. The difference is whether the splash page is displayed to all visitors by default or not - that what is accounting for the major discrepancies. Most of you guys probably have this setting chosen in your account so you never notice the difference. Note, just yesterday it was re-enabled by default so view counts will jump immensely.

Also finally the splash page views were paid last year. We put that in as an incentive and basically said the same logic - where we needed to figure out monetization and we wanted compensation for the guys who got the gold.

Do also note the biggest reason that the photography program was on hold this year is that photographers got paid the lions share of the yearbook contributor budget. Every time you put a photo in the system, its a contribution towards the yearbook and if you get in there you get paid pretty good. I admit, this was flawed overall logic, and something we'll address.

Thanks for clearing this up...I am new to the photo program as of this year and to be honest -nothing- was really explained. I had no idea that there was any monetization part of it at all until I was talking to Gavin Rudy about it.
 
Why no login box on the splash page any more? Logging in quickly is more important to me than viewing the POTD, but if there is a login box on the splash page then that's something else to look at so that's what I currently bookmark. If there is to be no login box on the splash page then I'll change my bookmark tohttps://www.newschoolers.com/home meaning no more POTD to look at unless I go out of my way to visit the splash page.
 
13006343:Mr.Bishop said:
Here's what I don't understand -

Why is having that information directly within the upload form not enough information? I honestly don't know how to communicate it better, and need your assistance as to why you've never seen it before.

Look:

View attachment 713740

Doug, My photo of Noah was uploaded with dimensions of 2000px by 3000px, and was still skipped for "Bad Picture Width" that day:

Noah Albaladejo' ... (+63, -0): SKIPPED - Bad Picture width (2000)

It sounded like there possibly was some change recently that the 1000px minimum isn't the actual minimum? Or portrait images need to have a different size?

**This post was edited on May 27th 2014 at 10:19:55am
 
13006358:Boax said:
Why no login box on the splash page any more? Logging in quickly is more important to me than viewing the POTD, but if there is a login box on the splash page then that's something else to look at so that's what I currently bookmark. If there is to be no login box on the splash page then I'll change my bookmark tohttps://www.newschoolers.com/home meaning no more POTD to look at unless I go out of my way to visit the splash page.

713746.jpeg

whatchu_talkin_bout_willis.jpg
 
13006375:Mousseau said:

Looks like it's a display resolution (height) issue. The top bar appears on my 1680x1050 screen but not on my 1280x800 one. The top of the image (not the top of the login bar) is aligned to the top of the browser window. Same issue in Firefox and Chrome.

It's still there, floating off the top of the screen with the cursor in the normal place, it's just not visible. If I'm not logged in I can go to the splashpage and hit return to log me in because my password is saved. So not actually a big deal for me but you should think about fixing this. Look at your stats for screen resolution; screens under 1000px tall make up enough of a share of visitors that they should still be considered.
 
13006356:Ito said:
Thanks for clearing this up...I am new to the photo program as of this year and to be honest -nothing- was really explained. I had no idea that there was any monetization part of it at all until I was talking to Gavin Rudy about it.

Yeah well we didn't manage to launch that part of it before the season ended, which is why you didn't hear about it. We neither managed to do it nor tell people we weren't doing it, so I understand that there is some frustration going around. Super sorry, and we will be way more transparent in the future.

13006358:Boax said:
Why no login box on the splash page any more? Logging in quickly is more important to me than viewing the POTD, but if there is a login box on the splash page then that's something else to look at so that's what I currently bookmark. If there is to be no login box on the splash page then I'll change my bookmark tohttps://www.newschoolers.com/home meaning no more POTD to look at unless I go out of my way to visit the splash page.

Oops... bug.

13006361:Walter.1337 said:
Doug, My photo of Noah was uploaded with dimensions of 2000px by 3000px, and was still skipped for "Bad Picture Width" that day:

Noah Albaladejo' ... (+63, -0): SKIPPED - Bad Picture width (2000)

It sounded like there possibly was some change recently that the 1000px minimum isn't the actual minimum? Or portrait images need to have a different size?

**This post was edited on May 27th 2014 at 10:19:55am

Ah fucking jesus.... this was a mistake. It was part of the whole idea of making it the entire screen, which was a miserable failure. We were testing minimum widths and it got deployed like that. Super sorry. I'm going to ensure it changes back - though it should already be like that.
 
Note:

Splash page view counter not increasing was a mistake. It has been fixed and by tomorrow the view counts should start properly showing up.
 
13006802:Mr.Bishop said:
Note:

Splash page view counter not increasing was a mistake. It has been fixed and by tomorrow the view counts should start properly showing up.

Sweet, will it change counts on old photos?
 
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