It’s time to update COG’s once-famous photo gallery. Members who have a working knowledge of photo editing and basic IT skills are needed to help with this task. If you are a keen photographer with reasonable computer/web skills then please reply to this post ( ) with any questions or to volunteer.
When some remaining technical problems are sorted we can get together for training but this won’t be until the system is working properly which may be weeks away.
More info below.
Thanks
Julian
Background
The Photo Gallery has until recently been a source of images, information and inspiration to many thousands of people, the answer to many homework questions and supplier of quality photos that often ended up in books and magazines. A significant number of people discovered COG through its photo gallery. If you googled a bird that happened to be within COG’s domain, more often than not the COG gallery was first or second on the page of results.
Sadly this is no longer the case. Updating with new photos ceased some time before the new website was a reality, and has been difficult if not impossible since then due to technical problems. The gallery has fallen behind other similar resources and does not take advantage of thousands of great photos that COG photographers have produced in the last five years. Search engines can’t even find our gallery. To address these issues a contractor is in the process of redesigning the working parts of the gallery and as soon as this is completed and tested it will be time to start replacing and upgrading our photos and associated information.
The Plan
Roughly 8,000 photos of 300 species will end up in the gallery, involving a guesstimated 500 hours of effort to get them there. The plan is for a number of volunteers to share the work.
The work will be allocated by species, with one person responsible for completing one species before moving on to another. For each species the work will include:
- if necessary update the gallery information for the species, or create a new entry to match the revised Annotated Checklist of ACT Birds.
- call for new photos of that species, sort and evaluate them
- delete existing photos that are better replaced by new photos
- enter the selected new photos, add captions to new and existing photos, and arrange the order in which they will be displayed.
The objective is to end up with a well-rounded collection of photos of each bird, selected to include some to assist in identification including different ages and plumages, historically interesting photos, behavioural examples and some simply beautiful photos.
If we have five volunteers each spending five hours a week on this, we should be finished within 6 months. Obviously more volunteers or more hours a week will decrease the time.
