In making the recent gallery changes, you guys all seem to have forgotten about visitors, i.e. people who aren't members, probably don't want to become members, but who want to look at the images.

Since I joined this site a few years ago, it has become increasingly unfriendly to visitors. When I first joined, they could browse the galleries freely; the only things they couldn't do were upload images or comment. As far as I'm concerned, it should have stayed that way.

At some point (I can't remember when exactly) it was changed so that visitors could only access images if they went via a particular artist's gallery, i.e. they were no longer allowed to look at the general galleries. Before that change I used to send people a link to my gallery and suggest that they take a look at the more general galleries so that they could see other artists' work. After the change it became too complicated to explain how to see other people's stuff, so I only sent them the link to my gallery.

The recent changes have made the experience for visitors even worse. Now they can only view the reduced versions of a specific artist's images. In other words, if I send someone a link to my gallery and they click on a thumbnail, they only get to see the shrunk-down version of the image - if they try to 'zoom-in' to see it at full-size, they get asked to log in.

Visitors do not get options. In particular, they don't get the chance to specify that they would like to see the images at full-size, or even the size that the artist would prefer to be the initial view. The way the defaults are set up now (i.e. that the artist's preference for the initial view is the reduced version, and the viewer's preference is to see the reduced versions irrespective of the artist's preference) the visitor is stuck with the reduced versions.

When the new galleries came online, I said on another thread that I'd be leaving this site and deleting my gallery. I decided to wait a bit and see what happened once we'd all been 'listened to'. Before I finally click that 'Delete My Gallery' link that you've so temptingly added, can you answer just a couple of questions:

1. Are you going to change things so that visitors to the site can see our images at full-size?

2. How exactly are you going to reduce the images? Will all images be stored as JPEGs, even the ones that were uploaded as GIFs? And if so, what compression-quality trade-off will you be making?

In case you think I'm being overly fussy about all this, here's an image of mine that was uploaded as a GIF (JPEG compression doesn't work well for graphical images like this one) and for which a 700-pixel-wide version is totally inadequate:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1004453&member

Best wishes,
Simon.

Here's my two cents: If people want to freely browse, then they can join.  It takes all of sixty seconds.  Restricting viewing also helps keep the art thieves at bay, which is bad enough as it is.  With bandwidth a precious commodity here, can you imagine how bad it would be if they allowed open access to the entire Internet?

No thanks.  If people want the same benefits of Renderosity members, then they can become Renderosity members.  If they don't want to take the sixty seconds to join, but are willing to spend 10 minutes viewing various galleries, then they really aren't interested in art.

There are several web sites available for people to place art that have no viewing restrictions in place.  PBase and Flickr come to mind as some of the more popular.  Both have hundreds of thousands of users and the community at Flickr is absolutely enormous.

Just my humble opinion.

Just a small hmmm here...if the viewer really wants to see the image full size, a simple right click and save as will give them a dl of the full size image in the gif format it was uploaded as...but that takes as long as joining so they may as well, but many other viewers, likely the majority, who are just skimming/surfing by, like for instance me on most days , won't have to wait for a rather large image to load before surfing on to the next view.

bobbystahr, Right clicking will not work with the new setup because as soon as all images are converted, visitors will only see the resized versions. However, SimonKane, it was not meant to force people to sign on when they click "zoom in" if they were already viewing the image as a visitor. This will be fixed sometime this afternoon. Additionally, images are resized perserving the format they were uploaded in, i.e. jpg becoes jpg, gif becomes gif, png becomes png, etc. N

Hi Nick,

Thanks for the quick response, especially as it was exactly what I wanted to hear. :-)

Best wishes,
Simon.

-Nicholas...

                  was just basing that on what I had just tried...thanx for the update...LOL

I went to several 3D sites early on just looking to see what it ws all about. I stayed away from sites that you HAD to sign up for to even get anywhere on the site for a year or two. Just got tired of so many logins and passwords and having to registar at every site I can across. So I stayed away from rendo for a long time, same with some of the other sites. Finaly I had to give in and registar all over the place to get the freebies and post images and so on. No problem as I am more involved in it all now.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is it would be good for "outsiders" (lol) to be able to at least look at the gallery images without having to sign up. If they want the same benifits as rendo members then yes, they should join but it would be good to give an idea of what the site, the community is all about.

"..went to several 3D sites early on just looking to see what it ws all about. I stayed away from sites that you HAD to sign up for to even get anywhere on the site for a year or two. Just got tired of so many logins and passwords and having to registar at every site I can across."

Yeah I did that too and I know what you mean. I still get news emails from sites I haven't visited in years, just because I had to sign up to see what they were about. Can't recall my username, can't recall the password, so can't cancel their ebots.

*-Nicholas * actually only said visitors...nothing about having to sign up...i did so automatically when I first came here so was unaware visitors had to sign up....none of my friends who I've sent here however, has ever complained to me about it tho the visit often...just my 2 cents on this one...