The Sailor Moon Pocky Box : Articles

Help Desk: Visual Content


by Cyprine

The Better Gallery: Effective Image Hosting

Many quality Sailor Moon sites offer image galleries -- after all, part of the appeal of Sailor Moon is the number of beautiful images available both just as eye candy and as ingredients for web graphics and design.

However, while, it's easy to do a Google Image search, right-click, save, and upload an image to your site, and thereby build a gallery, having a lot of images doesn't always make a quality gallery.

A good gallery should adhere to these basic guidelines:

A description of each of these guidelines and how to satisfy them follows.

Quantity

Certainly the most obvious criterion for a good image gallery is a high quantity of images. The more images you can offer the unassuming viewer, the higher the appeal of your site. Let's face it -- beautiful Sailor Moon images are eye candy, and no one is immune to the lure of visual junk food. Website viewers are most likely to bookmark your site if they feel they can get a lot of the content they are looking for in one place -- your site.

However, when offering lots of images, keep in mind the limits of your host. Do not, under any circumstances, sacrifice the other guidelines for the sake of offering thousands of images. If you offer so many images that you will burn out your hourly, daily or monthly bandwidth allotment, then you need to consider cutting the number of images you host for the sake of fewer but better images.

Quality

While it's tempting to host thousands of images, sometimes your disk space or bandwidth concerns require you to cut corners. Occasionally, a webmaster may try to cut corners by shrinking an image or compressing it beyond recognition. When I was trying to host an extensive image gallery on Geocities, I tried doing this, and ended up uploading a bunch of useless images that were too small to print out, of too poor quality to use in banners or buttons, and ended up having to be trashed.

That being said, it is important to remember to maintain a high quality of images on your site. This might mean limiting the scope of your image galleries to one in which you know you have easy access to high quality content.

Rarity

Like quality, rarity is something of a hot commodity in image galleries. A small gallery of Yuuichirou images, for example, will find itself just as popular among webmasters viewing image galleries as the larges of the generic image galleries, because few sites bother to host large numbers of high-quality images of this oft-ignored character.

You can improve the rarity of your images by limiting the scope of your gallery to something less covered by other, larger and more established sites, that you can still generate your own content for. For example, if you have a scanner and a bunch of the B&W manga, you could make an image gallery dedicated to every instance of Sailor Mercury in the manga -- this would allow you to scan several high-resolution images that would be rarer because you took the time to go page by page and find nice images, and then collected them all in one place.

Organization

All the other guidelines have dealt with developing a good collection of images. This last guideline is all about presenting those images for the viewer, and it may be, by far, the most important aspect of a better gallery.

Good organization of a gallery requires that a viewer can not only quickly and efficiently scan through your entire collection to find an image they are looking for, but can find that image again if they choose to come back. That means that organization starts at the highest level, with sorting your images into some intuitive categorization system. Perhaps you split them into anime and manga, or between civilian and fuku forms, but a great image gallery is usually a collection of several smaller and manageable galleries. If I see an image in your gallery but don't download it right away, I should be able to come back, remember what it looked like, and navigate right to it simply based on what I remember of the image's contents.

Secondly, good organization relies on a proper presentation. Images are best presented to the viewer in some form of thumbnail system; while descriptive text links seem like a good way of saving space, they actually greatly detract from your site because no two people will describe the same image the same way, and even if you describe the contents of the image fully, with no visual reference as to what the image looks like, I still have to click the link to see if your description matches the image I'm looking for.

With thumbnails, there are two ways of thumbnailing an image: 1) cropping and 2) resizing. By cropping, I mean thumbnails that are all the same size but are basically a cropped part of the image without resizing. Resized thumbnails may still feature a smaller part of the image, but the image is resized so you get a more holistic view of the image. I really don't know why any image gallery would feature purely cropped thumbnails -- perhaps there's some stylistic benefit to zooming in on some obscure detail of an image to represent the whole image, but this tactic is almost as bad as a text link. Though there's a chance I may recognize the corner of Sailor Saturn's fuku, or the flower that borders an image, there's a better chance that I won't, and I'll still have to click on the thumbnail to know whether or not I want to bother downloading the image -- which defeats the whole point. That leaves resized thumbnails, which are really the only way of efficiently presenting your collection to your audience for quick perusal.

Also keep in mind the connection speed of your desired audience. While you may have a high speed cable modem, there still are people who are suffering through dial-up modem connections; you need to organize your gallery accordingly. Low-quality thumbnails broken up into a series of gallery pages with effective navigation allowing you to jump from page to page is much better than just throwing everything you have into one page and hoping your viewer's browser doesn't crash from the load time.

Also keep in mind that, while content managers that generate an image gallery for you may seem like a quick easy shortcut, they rarely generate the kind of space-efficient and aesthetically pleasing gallery that can be accomplished with a simple photo-editing software, some patience, and a lot of hard work.