We've gotten much more active recently in updating our website (www.steamlocomotive.info) and have been looking for ways to make it more interesting and more useful.

One thing that we've noticed along the way is that we've occassionally offered steam photos that don't fit into our site (scrapped locomotives, historic shots of locomotives that no longer exist, and so forth).

Since we have a ludicrous amount of available disk storage (about 900GB at the moment) we're thinking about putting up software called Gallery 1.3.4 which allows for photo uploading, automated thumbnailing, and so forth. We can create user accounts for people who'd like to display their photography or collections and they'll be able to add and maintain "Albums" on their own.

The immediate drawbacks I see are the necessity to monitor the thing, as we already know that there are a few individuals out there who will cheerily submit "inappropriate" photos through the current mechanism.

I'd like your comments. Is this something that would be useful? Should we do it? Or is it likely to become another little used feature that we'll eventually have to remove?

Regards,
Doug Bailey, Webmaster
www.steamlocomotive.info


Steam Locomotive Info
dougb@sunserver.com

Doug,

I think adding the gallery software you mentioned is a good idea. I'm sure there are people who would like to contribute/post pictures to this site (and others) who would benefit from such a thing. If you are talking about each photo having it's own URL, that would be the most useful, and user accounts would keep it legit. As you say if it doesn't work out you can shut it down and use the server space for something else.

I've contributed several (locomotive) pictures to the Steamlocomotive.info website, and would use it for a wider variety of subject matter should you make the change. It's already an excellent site and getting better all the time. Thanks for running it!

Stephen

SJHussar@aol.com