Quality and quantity

[Adrian Hoskins]

Hi Pete

You already know that I think ukbutterflies is one of the best websites around. Someone noted that the species descriptions still need to be done, and I will be inputting as much as you want for these.

About the only real criticism that I can make of ukbutterflies is that there are far too many images of each species - often a dozen or more shots of an adult or larva. In many cases there are several almost identical shots of a particular species, and the quality varies from excellent to substandard.

I can understand why you want to publish shots from all contributors, but I think the site would be notably improved if the number of images was reduced, using a bit of ruthless editing. Better I think to limit the pictures on the species pages to only say half a dozen high quality images of the adults, a couple of egg shots, one shot of each larval instar, and perhaps 2 or 3 of the pupa.

Perhaps the best method would be to include only the best available images in the species section, and to put the rest in a separate gallery - otherwise the site will eventually accumulate hundreds of shots of each species, which is unnecessary, and the quality of the site will deteriorate.

All the best
Adrian Hoskins

[Pete Eeles]

Thanks Adrian. I agree that similar shots should be trimmed, and that the gallery facility can suffice in many cases.

I actually "upped" the number of images per stage to 20 (it was 16) in order to get as many different perspectives as possible.

Also (slightly different tack) I assume that this restriction wouldn't apply to aberrations - until we exhaust all abs!

But before we start pruning ... what do others think?

Cheers,

- Pete

[Perrycornish]

Hello, I'm newly registered but agree on the pruning. Too many images of a single species in an ID Gallery looks bad and can also be confusing due to colour differences, in the photo, etc:) Apart of course from aberrations