The TerraGenesis Image Gallery is intended for the long term storage of interesting and useful images of model terrain and relevant reference material. Work in progress images may be included if they show something that is likely to be of particular interest to others however the gallery should NOT be used for "day to day" images in support of your forum posts. Use it only for those images that are likely to be of interest long after your forum thread has been deleted.
Clearly you should not post images that are off-topic i.e. not related to terrain making, however you should also take care not to post images that are likely to cause offence or be distressing to a viewer (even if they have relevance as wargaming reference materials). Any such images will be removed by the administrator and could ultimately result in the member who posted them being banned.
By uploading an image to our gallery you are stating that you are the owner of the image. You must not upload material that would be in breach of anyone's copyright. Please also note that when you upload an image to our gallery, although you still own it, you are granting permission for TerraGenesis to use it on our website and that once given, this permission cannot be revoked.
Registered members are allowed to upload 5 images while those who have acquired a Gallery Critic Award (see below) may upload 10. After that the number of additional images that a member may upload depends on the votes that their existing image receive from other members (see below). These measures have been put in place to encourage proper use of the gallery.
Your current limit, and summary data about your images is shown on your profile page. You can see the current rank of your own images by hovering your mouse pointer over a thumbnail of the image in one of the gallery views.
Gallery Images are automatically resized such that they have a maximum width of 640 pixels and/or a maximum height of 480. A thumbnail image is also generated automatically. Please note however that the system has problems resizing large images and if your image file is larger than 1mb you are strongly advised to resize it yourself prior to uploading.
Images begin with a rank of 5. This figure may increase or decrease depending on whether other members vote to say that it's an image that we should keep or something we should discard. Should an image's rank be reduced to 0, it will be deleted.
Members can earn Gallery Critic Awards by voting on other images, and Photographer Awards as a result of other members voting favourably upon their images. Further details of these awards can be found by clicking this link. Note that a members ability to upload images is also determined by their acquisition of awards, and the ranks of their existing images.
Albums provide a means of grouping images. An image does not need to be in and album but can also be in several. There are two types of albums:
Private Albums - Are not shown to other members. You can create and use them to store your favourite images i.e. images that you will probably want to refer back to.
Public Albums - These collections are shown to others but you should only create them if that grouping is likely to be of particular interest to others.
Think carefully before creating an album. There is, for example, no point creating an album to contain all of your images because we already have a mechanism to view all images by any given member without the need to create an album.
We have currently 'budgeted' for the gallery to hold 10,000 images and when we hit that limit we will need to delete some. In addition to the image ranks, our system monitors which pictures are being looked at i.e. which thumbnails get clicked in order to view the full sized image. All of this data will be used to determine which are the least popular and least useful images and these will be deleted first.
You should therefore endeavour to fill out the upload form as well as possible. This will increase the likelihood of your pictures coming up in searches and images with good descriptions i.e. descriptions that tell the viewer what they are most likely to want to know about the image, will attract more votes.