To Upload the Photo, Or Not To Upload the Photo

I seem to recall having read something about this, but I can't find it in the archives, and I'm not sure if it addressed the issue I would like to bring up anyway.

Going through the PFs, I have been realizing how useful some of the more specialized pics of plants can be. By specialized, I mean pictures of seeds, seed pods, seedlings, root structures, etc. As I understand it, if a plant in the database has no associated image, the first picture that a moderator releases to the PF then becomes the default image, the picture that will show up on the search page while looking for a plant.

In my case, I have some of these specialized images that I would like to put into the database, however the corresponding plant does not have an image yet in the database. For example, I have recently started some flats of a decorative kale cultivar, and have been taking pictures of the seedlings as they grow. However, I am reluctant to release an image that isn't reflective of what might more accurately reflect a typical garden specimen of a given plant. I often use the PFs as a way to select cultivars of a species I would like to grow, or sometimes just to browse semi-randomly to see if something catches my eye. While specialized pictures in the database are very informative, and I would personally like to see more of them in the plant files, I don't know that the PFs would be best served by having them end up as the pictures that represent plants in the PF search, especially if later images more to type come in shortly after the specialty images. How do the moderators feel about this issue? Should I just send them in anyway? There are several obvious workarounds, and probably the most user-friendly one, but one that would seem to entail a rather difficult and time-consuming task for the PF administrators would be that they would bump a more typical image into the "First Picture" slot should a more typical image of a plant come in. This, however, introduces judgement calls about what typical means, and could cause hurt feelings if a photo is bumped, or only one out of a number of typical images are chosen to be the "First Picture".

Some easier workarounds might be just setting up a new journal to hold images of specialized plants until a more typical image can be provided to the database, or going out on the web and asking people for permission to use their picture or pictures that might better typify the plant at issue, then sending out one's own specialized picture. Sometimes, though, pictures might get lost in the shuffle and the pictures never uploaded, and the question becomes whether no image is better than a specialized image as "First Picture". My sense is if it is a plant like a new flowering cultivar that might become popular, it would be better to wait and see if others would upload typical pictures before pulling the trigger, but of course cultivars come and go sometimes with no one really noticing, however for plants that one is unlikely to encounter in a typical garden, then the question of whether to upload or not becomes more salient.

How can anyone write so much about whether to upload a picture or not? Sorry about that.

-Greg

Greg, go ahead and upload them. Yes, that may be the default picture for now, but if/when a more general picture is submitted, we can rearrange the images to display another one at the "top", which also becomes the representative photo on any summary page.

Thanks, I will go ahead and upload from now on. I just like to make things more complicated than they have to be. :)

-Greg