Effective October 16th, the Surrealism, Alternative, Objects, and Weird gallery genres will merge under the Abstract gallery genre. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out. 

These changes are aimed at making it easier for you to find images and display your work in a more organized structure. 

Thank you for everything you do to make our community a success. 

You might as well. No one here seems to know the difference anyway - plenty of overlap in all of them. You could also combine Aviation, Transportation and Military. I'm sure there are plenty of ways to reduce the number of genres.

That's a good idea. I will make a note. 

It's a terrible idea! At least as described... I don't know why you're so determined to reduce the number of galleries in such a haphazard way. You might do better using some text and images with your genre galleries to educate your members, or post a reference page with an article describing the expectations. You can't make people read it, though some people will. You're probably a bit limited to what you can actually do with your categories by having a huge body of already-uploaded images. Nevertheless, you can make decisions about what happens going forward.

Just looking at surreal, weird, abstract, and alternative, you have compatibility issues. Lots of people don't really understand abstract art, what it is or what function it serves. Abstract is art more focused on the design aspect of the work - All compositions have underlying abstract designs that give them structure. An abstract work of art would emphasize that underlying structure, often dispensing with the conventional subjects of the work. Abstract art is not about objects, though there is such a thing as figurative abstraction. Even that is not just pictures of things assembled in a way that seems impossible - That's more for the surreal crowd. I've yet to see an online gallery of abstract work that would remain abstract without heavy curation.

Surreal art, on the other hand, is largely (not exclusively) art of the subconscious. It is deliberately and shamelessly weird. So, you can't higgledy-piggledy throw abstract and surreal in the same box as some surreal art is actually richly rendered illustration of objects. Yet even then, the objects may not be the point. See Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe, among other works. That's more about the idea of how objects are translated into images of the object through the filter of the mind. We know the objects we see in images are not the actual objects, but we accept the visual representations. Similarly, one can render a cube, but that cube in the rendering is not a cube. It's a 2d representation of the cube. Even that - Not sure how much of that idea is actually surreal, but there is always some slop at the edges of any genre or movement - We have room to maneuver. Moving on...

The problem with lumping aviation, transportation, and military together is, not all military images involve aviation or transportation. Maybe military should be its own thing. Aviation is a form of transportation, so that can join transportation.

I see I'm the only one with anything to say about all this. Could be I'm the only one who cares? IDK. Back in the day, DA had a lovely, granular image classification system with volunteers assigned to keep the containers clean. They scrapped it all for the nebulous mess that is hashtag hell. Part of Eclipse - Can you imagine naming your site design after a phenomenon that blocks out the sun? Sort of fits in their case.

Anyway, glad to see you're not going that route. Still, simplification must be done carefully, with some nuance and caring for what goes into the galleries. I've no idea what "alternative" is supposed to contain, so I'm not really sure what you should do with that category. But maybe that should be defined or name-changed and refined so that it can serve a useful purpose without making a mess of some other genre. I don't envy you the task. Thanks for your time and attention. Cheers!

I agree that whatever the frist four are, they are not abstract. The three excluding Objects would probably be mergable into Weird or something like that.

I will rethink and post here. Thanks for the feedback. 

Sounds good. Thanks :)

'Alternative' sometimes seems to be a cover for AI. I still think AI should have its own gallery for all pure AI and 'assisted' AI.

I agree that whatever the frist four are, they are not abstract. The three excluding Objects would probably be mergable into Weird or something like that.

Rural/Countryscapes and Scenic would seem mergeable. Still Life and objects, depending on how theya re used, night merge - though i am not sure either title would be all-encompassing, so that might need thought (nothing immediately occurs to me). Medieval and Historical seems to be a subset and a superset. Travel would seem a better fit with Aviation and Transport than Military. And of course there are a number of sub-genres that could merge with fantasy, though i suspect they each get a fair bit of use so a combination might be too may to keep track of.

You could try addng a word to weird, such as bizarre, to try to broaden it (though I am not sure that particular combination would do the job). Left field?

Let's be clear: Abstract art and Surreal art are not just weird, bizarre or left field (whatever that is). And they don't both go in the same box together. And none of this matters if there isn't going to be any attempt at clear definition or curation. People will still stick stuff wherever, at which point genre becomes irrelevant as a means of finding something. I see that in several genres.

Putting aviation and transportation with travel fails when one looks at what's actually in the travel gallery! Some pictures of places, a lot of pictures of people, some cars, some other stuff... It's all a mess and I still don't envy anyone the task of cleaning it up. Besides, aviation and transportation manage to stay on target more than maybe any other genre! Sure, there are some head-scratcher entries, but they are very few in number, especially compared to what I see in some of the other genres.

'Alternative' sometimes seems to be a cover for AI. I still think AI should have its own gallery for all pure AI and 'assisted' AI.

I have added a request to put text underneath the gallery genre name that will hopefully help members understand what images are in and should be uploaded to that particular genre. We are also working on a gallery FAQ. It definitely is a big project! 

Thank you @msansing . Good on you and Rendo for making the effort!

I agree with, support, and second @Afrodite-Ohki's statement about AI art.

Circling back to the reorganization - I think surrealism could be merged with Fantasy.... 

Ah, no, not really. Surrealism has very few things to do with fantasy as a genre. 

This is surrealism:

This is fantasy:

You merge the two, there will be a lot of disgruntles. It doesn't make sense. They are different genres.

Ah, no, not really. Surrealism has very few things to do with fantasy as a genre. 

This is surrealism:

This is fantasy:

You merge the two, there will be a lot of disgruntles. It doesn't make sense. They are different genres.

True but there's not a lot of surrealism in our surrealism :) 

You merge the two, there will be a lot of disgruntles. It doesn't make sense. They are different genres.

True but there's not a lot of surrealism in our surrealism :) 

While it is true that Surrealism is fantasy in that it is usually fantastical and or dreamlike in it's qualities, it is not the type of Fantasy most associate with the Fantasy Genre.  Most think of the Fanatsy Genre as containing elements of the High Fantasy or Fantasy literature and games with things like castles, dragons, wizards, magic, monsters, warriors and such.  While the word Fantasy can be applied much more boradly, when assigning as a genre for visual media it is important to consider how the greater public will associate and think of it.  The meanings of Surrealism, Abstract, Impressionist (why don't we have an impressionist genre? Can it even be represented in 3d) can be discussed and argued from several angles I feel that doing so runs the risk of art snobbery.  Even more importantly, these genres have multiple sub categories as well... and it is certainly possible to have an image that crosses genres. 

I have done a lot of Surreal art in my time, both traditional and digital.  I am also a fan of Surreal Art (especially the works of Salvador Dali, M.C. Escher, and H.R. Geiger).  I definately strongly feel it should remain a seperate and distict category and have better curation in terms of what media is added to ti.  I do like the idea presented by Torquinox to add text tags explaining the genre galleries to users, though as was said you can not force people to read them.  Still, I am all in favor of trying to lift people up and educating them rather than watering down the galleries to make them "easier" to understand.  

How would you combine three genres into a single one? I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this!

Perhaps, Travel, Transportation, Aviation. ?