Tyndale Choral Society - Photograph Album
The 2006 version of our website included a ‘photograph album’.
Although it seemed a good idea at the time, the design was suboptimal.
There is a much better way for members of the society to collect and share photographs.
The disadvantages of hosting our own album are:
high quality photographs are relatively expensive to store and transmit
- so our album can contain only small, medium quality images
the sample on the right illustrates the limit of what is possible
(the file size is 1.1MB - it may take a long time to appear - that’s the problem)
only the website administrator can add material to the album
- a bottleneck and disincentive
only a basic ‘click and view’ function is feasible.
To address these issues, our album is now hosted off-site, by
flickr.
Just click the link to open the album and explore.
You will see the Tyndale Choral Society ‘group photo pool’.
Click a thumbnail to see a bigger image; if you like the picture, the little magnifying glass will offer you a selection of sizes.
Image quality is as good as the original.
You can download and print any photograph.
If all you want to do is ‘view’, that’s it.
You will be able to look at everything in our ‘group photo pool’ and anything else on
flickr
that is in the public domain.
To go further you must set up an account.
There are two types of account: free and fee.
Unless you are an enthusiastic photographer and want to use
flickr
for other purposes you should select the
free account.
The easiest way to do this - and get your membership of our ‘group photo pool’ set up at the same time -
is to contact the TCS
website administrator.
Now you can contribute to the album.
The first step is to upload photographs to your personal area in
flickr,
(make sure that you designate them ‘public’).
Then send them to the group so that we can all see them.
As a member, you can add captions and comments to both your own and other group members’ pictures.
You will never need to upgrade to a fee account for Tyndale use.
Consider it only if you decide to use
flickr
as an off-site archive for all your material, want to start a ‘group photo pool’ of your own
or wish to share a large number of high definition photographs with your friends and family.
A word about privacy. Take care to distinguish carefully between photographs that you wish to share and those that are private.
The security controls work well but you must use them (the default setting is ‘public’).
The service is relatively robust and secure;
flickr
is a Yahoo company.
To summarise, we now have:
unlimited capacity and bandwidth at no cost to the society
superb presentation and rich function
empowerment - every member can contribute directly.
The album is ready, there’s just one missing component: lots of photographs. That’s your responsibility!