• Attn: If you were on the old forum, you may have to reset your password!

Please Don't Combine Pictures or Write on them!

scarfwearer

Administrator
This is not a rule, or a requirement, but can I ask people not to combine pictures or write text on them unless you really, really need to. There are a number of reasons for this:

  • About a quarter of our members are using smart phones to access the forum on a regular basis. We've gone to some lengths to make sure that the forum is usable on screens with 300 pixel width or even less. When the screen is that narrow we layout people's posts differently to make the best use of the available width. If you join pictures up sideways, we can only resize them to a single screen width. If they're not joined, we can stack them vertically.
  • We're not presently doing much specifically to support larger screens, but a mosaic of pictures built into one image is unlikely to be welcome in that context either.
  • we can't link to the sub-images
  • They make really poor thumbnails
  • A mosaic of images is not going to work well with any image manipulation features we might add to the forum, e.g. colour correction, contrast enhancement, white balancing, etc. (I don't have any immediate plans for that, so don't get too excited). Such features are likely to be mostly for the person posting the picture, but it seems likely that there might be situations where it's applied automatically, and on the fly for individual users.

You can uses spaces, newlines or even tables to layout pictures horizontally, but please don't use your image editor.



There are other issues with text. Once text is on a picture:
  • Text on a picture that looks good at normal window widths will be illegible on a smart phone.
  • we can't spell check it (or correct it in other ways)
  • we can't search for it
  • we can't translate it into other languages (yes, a good 10% of our members are from non-English speaking countries, and with webpage translation they can do a good job of translating the forum into a language that's more comfortable to read.)
  • A year from now you may have lost the original image and may desperately want to change the text.
  • We don't presently do much specifically for accessibility, but text in images is generally a nightmare for that too. Some people have low vision. Some people are colour blind (in different ways). Some people are dyslexic...
  • Also bear in mind that we have multiple themes on the forum with different colour schemes, e.g. the dark theme which makes everything nearly black. If you choose a border colour between the images you join, it's likely to be completely wrong for most of the themes on the forum. Black does not go with everything...
  • and lastly we can't moderate it without removing the photo. This may not matter too much to you, but it matters to the staff!

Generally when you write text on a photo you're making a lot of layout and typography decisions without even realising it that will be inappropriate for some fraction of our users. Please leave those decisions to the forum software and other users' preference choices.

Having said all that there are some situations where it's unavoidable, if you're measuring off screen shots for example. Even in those cases it's best to keep text on the photos as minimal as possible. Any explanations are much better listed below the photo, referring to markers of some kind.

I've seen a number of examples of these recently from different people. It's not that common, but like a lot of things it's looking like it might become more fashionable, and that would not be good.

Phew! That's a lot of explanation!

Thanks all,
Crispin
 
This topic appears to need a bump.  All, please re-read Scarfwearer's request regarding text on pictures and consider politely complying.
 
And another bump!
Please don't combine pictures or write on them before you post them, people!

It makes the forum experience worse in a number of ways.
See the first post in this topic.

Thanks
Crispin
 
Just a different perspective, but putting text on photos is a safeguard against scammers using your photos. If this is a requirement I will not be sharing original work here. I have seen photos of things made by a creator used to scam people on the sale type sites. The text not being legible on a phone should not be a deal breaker for text. This is just my opinion, but as a creator who posts on here I feel my opinion is relevant.

I love this site, and I'm here a lot. So I hope this doesn't become a hard requirement.
 
Just a different perspective, but putting text on photos is a safeguard against scammers using your photos. If this is a requirement I will not be sharing original work here. I have seen photos of things made by a creator used to scam people on the sale type sites. The text not being legible on a phone should not be a deal breaker for text. This is just my opinion, but as a creator who posts on here I feel my opinion is relevant.

I love this site, and I'm here a lot. So I hope this doesn't become a hard requirement.

I mean that post was 12 years ago, how egregious are the wateemarks you use?
 
Back
Top