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After many many months of hard work, the new dakka gallery is now up and running for public use here. Even you lurkers can vote on images, but only registered users can uploading things.

The gallery is a sort of software mix of photobucket/imageshack, coolminiornot and dakka, and has a tonne of features that have never been used anywhere else. We've tried to mix the best from all places to create the ultimate online gallery for wargaming related images.

Before anything else, be aware that there is a very minor bug with the login for some people. If you get a 'please log in' message, then please come back to the forum, click 'logout' and then clear your dakka cookies in your web browser. Next, login again and you should then have proper access. This is just a minor bug that has come about from me restarting the server with people still logged in - it will get cleaned up automatically over the next few days. We still have a fair few add ons and features planned for the next few weeks so you will see constant improvement.

I should explain how things work as the gallery is the type of system you could spend months on, only to find you have missed some cool, key bit of functionality...

The gallery home page can be found at http://www.dakkadakka.com/gallery (or click 'gallery' in the top right of any page). The home page highlights some pseudo random images, and contains links to your gallery homepage (where you can find a listing of all the images you have uploaded), a link to browse the gallery which shows you the best recent images, and a link to upload more of your own images. If you have ever attached an image in modeling & painting, project logs or the photo dump forums, that image will have been imported into the gallery automatically already so check out your gallery page as you might have loads of images already there. You can also browse by tags and a number of fixed searches from the home page too.

The 'browse the gallery' link from the homepage takes you to the search engine (also accessible from the bottom of the gallery home page, or by direct link to http://www.dakkadakka.com/core/gallery-search.jsp ). The search engine has a huge range of options for finding images and has a very advanced text search that will improve as more and more people use the new gallery. The gallery also supports the promotion of your ebay auctions and you can search for auctions easily too. If you want to promote a gaming Have a play around and enjoy! We have over 10,000 images already and that number will grow rapidly when the gallery gets opened up to the public.

Viewing a specific image is where the real magic happens. Check out http://www.dakkadakka.com/gallery/67-40k%20traitorguard%20sentinel.html for an example of this. The most interesting feature that is going to be fantastic for high quality images is that you can move your mouse over large images and zoom in and navigate in a manner similar to google maps. Try it out and check out the great detail on some of the better painted models that have been uploaded to dakka over the past year. Below the image you will find image tags which you can click to find similar images. If an image is in a gallery created by the user who uploaded it, you'll be able to navigate to other images within that gallery and check them out easily too. You'll be able to click through to any related web pages, project logs, etc that you might have missed in the past if the image has an associated web page link. You can comment on images and read the comments from other users. You can get all the code ready to copy/paste for inserting the image into forums, web pages, emails, IM, and the dakka articles system too. Finally, you can see all the camera information so if you are a photography geek you can learn more about your favourite images.

As the gallery is so brand new there are a few issues with which we could use your help. Once the gallery has had a lot of votes, traffic, etc. the images will rotate in a clever fashion but right now things might still be a bit clumped together. When you vote on an image, the next image it shows you should be a high rated image that you have not seen before. However, because we have literally just launched, there are not many images with votes on them (we require 5 votes before we count them properly to prevent new images from rushing to the top of the gallery with one 10/10 rating). We need you to vote on images so that the more boring WIP images are filtered to the bottom, and the better, interesting and great images filter to the top. Voting is easy and just needs you to click the rating out of 10 that you think the paintjob and 'coolness' of the image deserves. If a rating doesnt apply (eg; paintjob on a non-painted model) you can select N/A for not applicable.

Once you have chosen the votes, it will automatically submit the votes and show you the next image. However, if you have made more than 100 posts on dakka, you are a trusted user. This means that you have the power to add and remove tags from images to help us categorise them. When you vote, if the image has less than 4 tags associated with it, it will prompt you for help and ask you to enter some tags. Tags are just short snippets describing the image and are separated by commas. For example you might tag an image "40k, space marines, ultramarines, chaplain" to help people find it in the future. Tagging is a big help and will let us do loads of things in the future so please tag if you can tolerate it. If you hate the tag popups and find it spoils your enjoyment of the gallery, then you can turn them off by going to your forum profile and choosing "Yes" for "Disable gallery 'help us tag this image' popups". You will have to logout then login again for the settings to take effect though.

Many thanks to the DCMs and Moderators for helping us test and fix bugs over the past week. Enjoy the new gallery everyone and let's keep pushing dakka towards greater things.

Nice one! Thanks for all the hard work on our behalf.

As Lego noted above if you have more than 100 posts on Dakka when you browse the gallery if an image has less than four 'tags' you will be prompted to add more 'tags' to the image.

You can hit 'cancel' to skip this dialogue box if you don't have any further tags to add, and you can always add more tags to a picture (even one that already has four or more tags) by clicking on the 'tag this image' link.

A few notes on tagging. The goal of tagging is a way to help improve the search engine to find images. The more appropriate tags an image has, the more ways people will be able to find and sort the images in the search engine.

With that in mind here are some helpful ideas for how to tag images, although you really can feel free to tag a picture any way you like as long as the word appropriately describes the image.

Here are some of the basics:

1) Game -- such as 'Warhammer 40,000' , 'Warhammer', 'Warmachine', 'Hordes', 'Flames of War', etc.

2) Army/Race Type -- 'Eldar', 'Empire', 'Imperial Guard', 'Cryx', etc.

3) Unit Name -- 'Wraithlord', 'Tomb King', 'Sentinel', etc.

4) Type of model(s) -- 'infantry', 'vehicle', 'tank', 'monstrous creature', 'hero', 'bike', etc)

5) uniquely created model(s) -- 'conversion' for a heavily converted model, 'scratchbuild' for a scratchbuilt model, 'WIP' for a model that isn't finished being constructed or painted, etc.

6) Defining characteristics -- 'wings', 'robed', 'powerfist', etc. Any really noticable feature/weapon/equipment the model has.

7) Painting style -- 'bare metal', 'primered', 'drybrused', 'ink', 'wash', 'weathered', etc.

8) Groups of models -- 'army', 'squad', 'team', etc.

9) Non-mini pictures -- 'scenery' (pics of scenery), 'game table' (pics of gaming tables), 'game room' (pics of a game room), 'gamers' (pics of gamers), 'battle' (game in action), etc.

10) Manufacturer -- 'GW', 'Forgeworld', 'Privateer Press', etc.

11) Battle/Posed Shots -- If the shots depict action you can call them 'action shot', a picture of a game in action can be called 'battle' or 'battle report', big games can be called 'mega-battle' or 'apocalypse', etc.



And really this is just some core ideas. Just try to think of what words you might imagine putting into the search engine to find a picture and then start tagging appropriate pictures with those words.

Thanks in advance for anyone who helps us all out by tagging pictures!


P.S. Feel free to use abbreviations as tags (such as 'apoc' for 'apocalypse'). As long as I can figure out what the abbreviation means, I can direct the abbreviation to point to the main category name.

P.P.S. The tagging system is not case-sensitive so don't bother taking the time capitalizing anything.

Wow... this is really impressive! The zoom-in feature is incredible, and I assume allows for the upload of some quite large images (both dimension and size-wise). Can photos uploaded here be hot-linked to other places we post our images for critique like an image hosted on Voidgamers and photobucket? If so I'll seriously consider shifting all of my 40k images to the Dakka host... on an aside, is the gallery exclusively for 40k/WHFB games, or would it be an appropriate place for a somewhat accomplished artist to host his many miniature and modeling works in one place short of having his own site?

EDIT: Much of what I asked was answered by yak, who posted at the exact same time as I was typing.

woohoo! I'm numer 666!

http://www.dakkadakka.com/core/gallery-user.jsp?u=666

Thanks for the details yak... I have some models to photograph this weekend, and I will definitely come here with them first, and try using Dakka for my hosting needs.

Prometheum5 wrote:Wow... this is really impressive! The zoom-in feature is incredible, and I assume allows for the upload of some quite large images (both dimension and size-wise). Can photos uploaded here be hot-linked to other places we post our images for critique like an image hosted on Voidgamers and photobucket? If so I'll seriously consider shifting all of my 40k images to the Dakka host... on an aside, is the gallery exclusively for 40k/WHFB games, or would it be an appropriate place for a somewhat accomplished artist to host his many miniature and modeling works in one place short of having his own site?

EDIT: Much of what I asked was answered by yak, who posted at the exact same time as I was typing.

Just to clarify, images can be up to 10MB each and you can upload up to 10 at once. We will host as many images as you have, so dont worry about limits. The larger the better to be honest! Photos uploaded here are designed to be hot linked, and the source code for hotlinking is provided on any image view page (view an image in the gallery to see what I mean). Any wargaming image at all is acceptable, so long as it is vaguely related to miniature wargaming (artwork, terrain, models, humour, etc) then we are happy to host it.

Prometheum5 wrote:Wow... this is really impressive! The zoom-in feature is incredible, and I assume allows for the upload of some quite large images (both dimension and size-wise). Can photos uploaded here be hot-linked to other places we post our images for critique like an image hosted on Voidgamers and photobucket? If so I'll seriously consider shifting all of my 40k images to the Dakka host... on an aside, is the gallery exclusively for 40k/WHFB games, or would it be an appropriate place for a somewhat accomplished artist to host his many miniature and modeling works in one place short of having his own site?

EDIT: Much of what I asked was answered by yak, who posted at the exact same time as I was typing.

Just to clarify a few points:

As long as the pictures are miniature game related in some way (and not a copyrighted image) they may be uploaded to Dakka, what game they are of/for does not matter.

This is a FREE service and we plan to keep it that way for as long as Lego and I own the site. So if the only thing you use a picture hosting service for is miniature game pictures, then at this point you may well consider canceling that service and just use Dakka instead.

Each image in the gallery provides you with a wide variety of links (IMG, html, etc) and you can even choose the size you want the picture displayed as when you link to it. Pictures hosted on Dakka CAN be used on any site you want.


Edit: Looks like Lego beat me to it!

I went and checked out the upload process a minute ago, and the 10 pics at once bit is simply phenomenal. I will start hosting my painted miniatures on Dakka as of this weekend when I have some new shots, sounds fantastic. I'll keep my historical models elsewhere, as they aren't for gaming, but I'll definitely migrate my good WM/Hordes images over here along with my 40k, and maybe some Battletech stuff. Thanks for providing such an awesome service!

The voting system is addictive! It just keeps feeding you new pics.

How much space do you guys have? I mean, if everyone starts uploading 10 mb pics won't that fill up quick? There's no limit on how much 1 user can upload?

This might be an incentive for me to take new pics of pretty much everything and build a big gallery here instead of updating the html by hand on my site

Oh, and I know you just got the photos done but would you ever consider adding video? Might be cool for some projects like that fella doing the RC Land raider and guys who want to make video tutorials for painting and stuff like that

Entirely too cool, thanks Lego et al. for this great new addition! I can see it really jumping off once more users start to realize the potential here. Great work!

Necros wrote:How much space do you guys have? I mean, if everyone starts uploading 10 mb pics won't that fill up quick? There's no limit on how much 1 user can upload?

This might be an incentive for me to take new pics of pretty much everything and build a big gallery here instead of updating the html by hand on my site

We have plenty of space and since I wrote the whole system myself, it is designed around a complicated clustering configuration that allows us to add storage and bandwidth as needed. We can scale indefinitely and even at 10MB per image it would take a huge amount of images before we even need to add a single additional server.

Necros wrote:Oh, and I know you just got the photos done but would you ever consider adding video? Might be cool for some projects like that fella doing the RC Land raider and guys who want to make video tutorials for painting and stuff like that

Youtube do such a great job with video that just embedding youtube videos in the forum is good enough in my opinion.

Teek wrote:Entirely too cool, thanks Lego et al. for this great new addition! I can see it really jumping off once more users start to realize the potential here. Great work!

We have close to 11000 images already. Any attachments in the painting/modeling forums and the photo dump forums are automatically put into the gallery. Hopefully we will pick up rapidly anyway.

Also, there was a bug preventing uploads from being processed correctly in some version of Internet Explorer. If you tried to upload and just had the upload form hang, go to this url: http://www.dakkadakka.com/core/gallery-upload.jsp?s=2&key=user and you can resubmit your photos (well 5 minutes from now when the update goes live you can!)

Necros wrote:How much space do you guys have? I mean, if everyone starts uploading 10 mb pics won't that fill up quick?

A 1 TB drive is around $150-200, thats a LOT of 10 MB pictures, maybe 10^6? My math is fuzzy.

Wow, it auto-loaded all of my battle report pictures, etc. Missing all of the important things from CMON...such as annoying banner ads..pop ups .

Question; At the bottom of my page there is a big jumble of text overlapping with different tags. Is this something I missed in a previous post..or?

AgeOfEgos wrote:Wow, it auto-loaded all of my battle report pictures, etc. Missing all of the important things from CMON...such as annoying banner ads..pop ups .

Question; At the bottom of my page there is a big jumble of text overlapping with different tags. Is this something I missed in a previous post..or?

If you mean all the tags at the bottom of the main gallery page (here), that is known as a 'cloud of tags' and is an increasingly popular way on websites to display the popularity of categories in a visual style.


Basically, that 'cloud' of tags at the bottom of the screen represents the most commonly used tags currently in the gallery (remember though that around half the images still aren't tagged yet, and even those that do don't always have all the tags they should). The more common a tag is used the LARGER the tag is displayed. So, for example, the 'Warhammer 40,000' tag is the largest tag on the screen which represents that it is the most commonly used tag on the images in our gallery.

Clicking on any of those tags will bring up a search page showing all the images tagged with that particular tag.

yakface wrote:

AgeOfEgos wrote:Wow, it auto-loaded all of my battle report pictures, etc. Missing all of the important things from CMON...such as annoying banner ads..pop ups .

Question; At the bottom of my page there is a big jumble of text overlapping with different tags. Is this something I missed in a previous post..or?

If you mean all the tags at the bottom of the main gallery page (here), that is known as a 'cloud of tags' and is an increasingly popular way on websites to display the popularity of categories in a visual style.


Basically, that 'cloud' of tags at the bottom of the screen represents the most commonly used tags currently in the gallery (remember though that around half the images still aren't tagged yet, and even those that do don't always have all the tags they should). The more common a tag is used the LARGER the tag is displayed. So, for example, the 'Warhammer 40,000' tag is the largest tag on the screen which represents that it is the most commonly used tag on the images in our gallery.

Clicking on any of those tags will bring up a search page showing all the images tagged with that particular tag.

Eh, well don't I feel stupid now . I don't really dig it...but I guess that's an aesthetic opinion.

yakface wrote:The more common a tag is used the LARGER the tag is displayed. So, for example, the 'Warhammer 40,000' tag is the largest tag on the screen which represents that it is the most commonly used tag on the images in our gallery.

Seems like you might want to filter out 40K, and maybe some other major words to make this a little more useful. I mean I almost guarantee that 40K will be THE tag, on a 40K site.

BTW, LOVING the new gallery, totally dig the zoom, busy uploading all my 40k related shots as quickly as possible.

Which reminds me, it there any way to do mass uploads instead of selecting each file one by one?

I have to say this thing is inspiring. I am painting just to upload.

BigToof wrote:Which reminds me, it there any way to do mass uploads instead of selecting each file one by one?

Well you can do 10 at a time, but if you mean something like an FTP-style transfer, no as I want to make sure we dont overload the server with image processing requests, so that is a natural limit to encourage people to be a little bit slower and to give the server a bit of a break every now and then.

legoburner wrote:

BigToof wrote:Which reminds me, it there any way to do mass uploads instead of selecting each file one by one?

Well you can do 10 at a time, but if you mean something like an FTP-style transfer, no as I want to make sure we dont overload the server with image processing requests, so that is a natural limit to encourage people to be a little bit slower and to give the server a bit of a break every now and then.

That's a good way to describe it. I've got a ton of pictures, and it would be nice to get a File Dialog box that allows multiple selections at the same time. If you want to mitigate some of the server load, I can understand, maybe later when the initial rush to this really cool service slows down.

Wow, just spent a few mintues strolling through the gallery. Very very cool. Thanks so much to the gallery mechs! Everything looks slick as hell.

Thanks very much for this resource. The time and effort put into it is very obvious to a web dude like me.

Ok then. That's not super addictive or anything. Next time you update dakka dakka just give out some crack for free...



My employer would be thrilled to know that I just spent an hour browsing pics.

Yay, your praise and enjoyment makes it all worthwhile for me. Suddenly all those lost weekends spent hacking away over the summer aren't so lost .

Alright, took my photos today and started uploading... all I can say is, this is the best gallery software I have ever used. You guys have done a truly remarkable service to the community with this... I LOVE this new gallery and will be using it for everything miniature gaming related from here on out.

EDIT: I'd like to make one suggestion... when you edit a photo, I'd like the next page to offer to redirect you back to that image or the sub-gallery, or your gallery, rather than just back to the gallery frontpage.

Cheers 'burner; here's another bucket of Enjoyment and Praise Mayonnaise for you to wallow in. Beautiful work... As others have said, it's certainly inspiring!

As a programmer who never completes programming projects (because they're usually just for me), I'm just as impressed. There're so many features already... sorry, I need to get back to checking it out.

Prometheum5 wrote:EDIT: I'd like to make one suggestion... when you edit a photo, I'd like the next page to offer to redirect you back to that image or the sub-gallery, or your gallery, rather than just back to the gallery frontpage.

This is now done on my development version. The next dakka release will contain this update, though at this stage with christmas coming up I'm not sure when that will be just yet (fairly soonish though).