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.