The photo queue boneyards |
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This newsletter is meant primarily
as a heads-up to our contributors about pictures that may be sitting in
the corrosion corners of their personal photo upload queues – in the
Removed Photos and Unaccepted Photos sections.
In short, your
Removed Photos section contains photos that you put there yourself, and
your Unaccepted Photos section holds photos that the screeners found
unsuitable for the AirHistory website. Until now, these photos remained
there indefinitely, but in the near future, these photos will start to
be deleted from the system. As of 20 May, any photos in your Removed
Photos and Unaccepted photos queues will remain there for one month
only. After that time, the photos will be deleted. A backup will be kept
for another month, during which time we can still retrieve a photo if
necessary. After that second month, the photos will be permanently
deleted from our servers and can no longer be restored.
So please
have a look at your Removed Photos in particular, to see if it will be a
problem if any of those photos disappear. Note that you also have a
different queue, Unreleased Photos, for photos that you want to
add to the database but that for various reasons are not yet ready for
screening. More about your Unreleased Photos queue below.
To
manage your personal photo queues, you need to be logged in on the
website. Then click the Account tab to reveal the dropdown menu. Your
main queue, My Upload Queue, contains any photos that still need to be
screened – thanks to the efforts of or screening team, it will often be
empty, or only show the photos you haven't released for screening yet.
Below it, you see your four minor queues: Unreleased Photos, Returned
Photos, Removed Photos, and Unaccepted Photos. The last three together
we might call the boneyards of your photo queue. And as any aviation
enthousiast knows, boneyards may still contain valuable assets, rather
than just trash! |
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Let’s start with the Unreleased
Photos section, which until recently was called the Hidden Photos
section, and arguably is an underrated feature of the website. It allows
you to hide a photo from screening in order to make adjustments to the
data later. Basically, you upload a photo, and then quickly click the
Hide from Screening button to put it on hold and keep it from being
screened prematurely.
For example, you are happily editing and
uploading some photos and you find that you need to look up an aircraft
version or a construction number, but don’t want to lose any steam from
your photo editing frenzy. Or you don’t have the inspiration to write
the comment you would like to add. Or you’re still waiting for a
friend’s opinion as to where you took that photo in 1986.
In such
cases, you can convenienty upload the photo, but put it on hold by
clicking the Hide from Screening button in the main queue. You will then
still be able to access it and edit much of the data, but it will not
be screened yet. When you get to finish the details, the photo is
already in the queue system. You don’t have to dig up the photo from
your computer or look up information again that you already found. You
only need to complete the data and release the photo into the AirHistory
screening queue by pressing the Release for Screening button.
A
key reminder is that the Unreleased Photos are under full control of the
user – they will never disappear. A photo thus hidden from screening
could remain in limbo forever. The idea is, of course, that the photo is
at some point either released for screening, or removed if you don’t
see it fit after all. Contributors currently have a total of almost 1200
photos in their Unreleased Photos queues, and we fear that many of
these have been forgotten about. So, if you’re using this feature,
please regularly check your Unreleased Photos queue, and either release
for screening or remove the photos that you're done with. |
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Returned Photos: the workshop |
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Returned photos are photos that
would benefit from some improvement, according to the screeners.
Acceptance criteria at AirHistory are very lenient compared to other
sites, but we do have some basic standards. Common issues that we see
are about exposure, sharpening and unlevel horizons. If we think there
is probably not much room for improvement, photos will often still be
accepted as they are.
If we think the flaw is too much and
probably correctable, the photo will be sent back – returned. Our
intention is very much that the photographer fixes the issue and then
puts such a photo back in the queue.
If your photo is returned,
you will receive an e-mail message. We try to describe as clearly as
possible what we’d like to see fixed. To put the improved photo back in
the screening queue, either follow the instructions in the e-mail, or
replace the photo in the Returned Photos queue on the website. Make sure
you are logged in and go to Account > My queue - Returned Photos.
Then click on the Replace Image button to replace the returned photo
with the new file, and the photo will be released into the queue again.
Please remember, just because a photo is returned, that doesn’t mean we
don’t want it. In fact, the opposite is true! |
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Removed Photos and Unaccepted Photos: the corrosion corners |
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These two unloved sections are
what we might call the corrosion corners of the boneyard. Removed photos
are photos that you deleted from the queue yourself. If you change your
mind and still wish to add such a photo to the database, don’t despair -
simply click the Restore button and the photo will be restored to the
main upload queue. There, if the photo or the data is not quite ready
for screening, you can click the Hide from Screening button to put the
photo on hold, as explained above.
The Unaccepted Photos queue
holds photos that have not been accepted and that we do not see as
suitable for AirHistory. These photos are shown here for reference
purposes only, as no action can be taken on these shots. Perhaps you
have a better photo to replace it, or maybe you are able to improve the
same original, but you will need to do a fresh upload into the queue. |
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- If you have uploaded
photos to the screening queue that are not quite ready to be added,
there’s no need to remove them – instead, you can use the handy Hide
from Screening function. Previously called Hidden Photos, your
Unreleased Photos queue is a safe storage area. Photos will not be
deleted. However, please don't let your aircraft catch dust there –
no one will see them! Please release them for screening as soon as
possible.
- Your Returned Photos queue contains those photos that
need improvement according to the screeners, but that we definitely
would like to add. Please try to fix the issue as soon as possible, or
contact us if anything is unclear.
- Photos in your other
two minor queues, the Removed Photos and Unaccepted Photos sections,
will no longer stay there indefinitely from 20 May, but will be
deleted after one month. So please regularly check your Removed Photos
queue in particular, to retrieve any shots you still might want to add
to our database.
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Fear not, dear readers, we are not
going to mingle in your private lives. Instead, we would like to give a
few tips about how to provide a date range with your AirHistory photos,
in case you don't know exactly when some shots were taken. This has
just been made a bit more user-friendly, and the relevant help texts on
the upload page have been updated. The following explanation may also be
helpful. If possible, we ask that you enter the full
date on which you took a shot, for example 1 June 2017. You can type
'2017-06-01' in the Date Taken input field, or use the calendar which
automatically pops up.
For pre-digital photos and slides
especially, exact dates are not always known. We understand that of
course and provide options to indicate a date range rather than a
single day. Please use those options if necessary – a realistic
date range is far more helpful to others than an exact date you're
actually unsure of.
If you know the month but not the
day, a handy trick is that you can still use the Single date field on
the upload page but enter ‘00’ for the day, for example
'1992-06-00'. This will display as ‘June 1992’. Similarly, if you only
know a year, you may enter ‘00’ for the month as well. '1949-00-00' wil
elegantly display as '1949'. By the way, you don't actually need to type
the hyphens: '20170601' or '19490000' wil work just as well! |
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It is also possible to provide a
more specific date range, and we would like you to do so whenever
possible. The option is activated by checking the 'Use Date Range'
box on the upload page. It works mostly the same way as the single
date input field. Thus '1994-12-20' to 1995-01-03' will show as ’20
December 1994 to 3 January 1995’.
To show whole months, for
instance ‘May 1982 to July 1982’, simply enter the first and last days
of those months: '1982-05-01' to '1982-07-31'. But you can also use the
'00' trick. If you enter '1982-05-00' to '1982-07-00', the system will
replace the '00' with the first or last day of that month respectively,
and the result will be the same. This not only saves seconds of your
time, but also has the additional advantage of not having to think about
months having 30, 31 or 28 days – or 29 in leap years. The system will
do it for you!
Similarly, if you enter the first and last days of
the years or, more conveniently, four zeros, the date range will show
as years only: ' 1951-01-01' to ' 1955-12-31', or '19510000' to '
19550000', will elegantly display as '1951 to 1955’. |
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So that is how to enter a date
range on the upload page – but how to establish a reasonable range
for a date you don't know? Period clothing and hairstyles, as
in Jonathan Verschuuren's SR-71 photo, are indicative enough, but
not actually useful for pinpoining a specific timeframe. Here are a few
pointers which, while often obvious perhaps, might help out. |
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- Your presence at a photo
location could of course give you a clue about the date if
a photo is your own – you moved to California in 1986, or
your first trip to Asia was in 2001. You had surely thought of this
already, but it's perhaps easy to forget when you start
concentrating on the plane in the picture.
- Aircraft come with
build dates, delivery dates, conversion dates and withdrawal dates. It
is often relatively easy to find the timeframe in which an airframe
served with a particular operator. For this you can use the many online
databases, registers and other resources that are available nowadays.
Some production lists and many useful website links can be found in the
Reference section in our top menu.
- Paint schemes and titles can
be misleading though – an aircraft may occasionally still be wearing a
previous operator's colours, although the titles are usually
updated very quickly. When a new livery is introduced it may take many
years to repaint an entire fleet. The splendid special colours on
the DC-8 below marked the US Bicentennial Year, but this does not
mean Bob Garrard took this photo in 1975-76. In fact – Bob kept
track of his photo dates fortunately – it was three years
later.
- A good and easy check is to view photos of the aircraft
already in the AirHistory database – have them sorted by photo date
and a fairly reliable time window for your photo may appear before
your eyes.
- You could also investigate another aircraft
appearing in the photo, or other shots that you know were taken on the
same occasion. In fact, combining several registrations in an internet
search might sometimes even produce an exact date from spotter logs,
such as the Show Reports section on the Scramble website. Scramble and
many other useful resources are of course linked to in AirHistory's
Reference section in the top menu.
- Buildings showing up in
photos can also be useful – it will often not be too hard to find out
when that terminal opened, or when the old control tower was torn
down. Or maybe the very airfield was new or closed not long after
your presence.
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In some cases, you could go on and
on – but obviously you need to stop somewhere and don't want to spend
hours dating a picture. What we do ask is that you narrow down your
dates as far as you can in a resaonably expedient way – using the
right sources it often doesn't take much time once you've done it a few
times. AirHistory is not just a picture gallery, after all, it's a
database. Dates are important. Each reliably narrowed-down date range
really is another important building brick in the significant aviation
history database we are constructing together! |
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Photos by Stephan de Bruijn, Alistair T. Gardener, Bob Garrard, Geoff Goodall, Fergal Goodman, Joop de Groot and Johathan Verschuuren |
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