Stock Photography

[Eclipse]

Flickr is owned by Yahoo.

My bad...I was thinking Picasa.

Yeah, they don't get a Christmas card from me, either.

This is one of the places that my Google Fanboy hat comes off, because they are pushing people into their Google+ BS in order to use some of their
services, which means you then have to be hypervigilant about just storing photos.   Thankfully I can turn it off at the domain level,
but that's not an option for everyone.  Picasa still works, but it nags and whines about G+ and most of the defaults are built around "social" with
no option to disable. 

Thankfully GDrive can now view photos, so I'm using that, but it has no gallery function so wouldn't be a good fit for a stock library, especially
for less-technical users.

[Pylon]

Anything considered as official stock photography should be admined by NHQ with a small group of non-goofball posters.

Should be handled by NHQ.  Lots of stuff we can agree should be done by NHQ.  But it isn't and it won't.  Probably not even in our lifetime.  So if we want to make CAP better, we can do the next best thing.  In an ideal world, yes, NHQ would handle and monitor and provide all of these resources for us.  But they don't and they will not, so let's move on to the next best solution which will be better than no solution at all.

[NIN]

Using Flickr or Picasa for a repository is really not quite what you want to do.

There are plenty of options for a web-based gallery sort of setup that has a finer degree of control.

You'd need an upload mechanism for photographers to submit their "stock and stock-like" photos.

You'd need a review (moderation, almost) mechanism, maybe even a feedback mechanism to reply back to the photographer why his or her photo was not accepted (*).

And lastly, you'd need a way to tag, attribute and publish these photos so they can searched, accessed and downloaded for use by folks across the country.

Like the folks at Writely (and other cool indie startups that got bought by Google, but without the cool buyout cash), the idea would be that if this idea proves out its worth, NHQ could say "Hey, uh, would you guys be interested in us folding this in to eServices for the submission & review part, and leaving the public display part out in the open for people to get images?"  It could be handed off to NHQ/IT and all it really costs them is the time to integrate it into the eServices security model somehow  (mind you, full eServices integration pre-supposes it gets done in .NET, but honestly, it would likely be done in PHP or similar... but at least you could prove out the concept, data model, processes and flow, etc, inexpensively and in a grass roots way)

(*) If you've ever submitted a photo to airliners.net, you may know what I mean here. I have submitted a half-dozen pretty decent pics to Airliners.net and all but one has been rejected.  They usually tell you why (Contrast is off, focus, bad cropping, whatever). They have *really* high photo standards, almost insanely high, but when your pic doesn't get chosen, at least they say "We liked your pic, but here's why its not being added.."  Same thing would apply here: "Great photo, but the focus is too soft.." or "Appreciate your submission, but this photo really isn't stock photography, its a cell phone snappie.."

[welsh]

Why reinvent the wheel? Flickr has all the features NIN requires. Groups can be set up to require approval by a mod before posting to the group pool, to avoid personal/crappy/inappropriate  pics. Group submissions require an active step by the user; they must explicitly submit a photo one at a time, or a batch of photos if they have flickr ninja skillz. mods can remove photos easily. Tagging and searching tags, even in a specific group, is already a feature of flickr.  You can even add a submission requirement of good tagging and captioning.

Oh, and the good part about flickr is its free and already set up. Each free account gets a ridiculous terabyte of space. Just need volunteers to moderate it, publicize it and encourage submissions (and then later clean it up as better photos of similar scenarios appear).

I have some happy encampment photos (including some meh one and cadet-staff-lulz ones) on my flickr stream, just search for the username awelsh or "andrew welsh" to find my photostream (note: also includes all my personal pics and some pro pics for blogging purposes). I have a collection and multiple sets for encampment.