On 6/21/06, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
Using FlickrLickr to filter donated images sounds like a great idea. I could upload them to the FlickrLickr database if there's an interface.
I could hack an authenticated HTTP POST form that would allow you to add metadata to the DB. Would that be good enough?
After the safe-upload experience, I wouldn't want to store the image on the toolserver ;-)
Sorry, I didn't follow this - what is the problem with storing images on the toolserver? I'm not sure my server could handle all the incoming image donations, and I've been thinking about migrating FlickrLickr to the toolserver anyway.
Two problems with this:
- Each image in a zip file would basically get the same description.
Otherwise, you'll have to include a text file with the descriptions, which is probably more hassle than uploading them one by one.
See http://scireview.de/wiki/donations2.jpg - for each file in the ZIP, the user would have to enter metadata after the upload.
- Zip files can be manipulated to grow into extreme amounts of nonsense
data. Even a small zip fil could potentially result in hundreds of GB of uncompressed data. A potential attack vector.
Listing archive contents should be a trivial operation. With PHP, you could use the Zip module, which has a zip_entry_filesize function (not sure if the toolserver has that installed). Or you could parse the output of the "unzip -l" command. If a file is much larger uncompressed than compressed, that's probably an indication of something foul.
I have altered the text to show that option more prominently. I'd prefer to give the uploader some choice, though. Choice makes people think, whil a single checkbox just gets, well, checked ;-)
I don't think most users of the form would have enough of a basis of knowledge about copyright and licensing to make an informed decision. If you want to make people think, prominently linking to a licensing tutorial might work better.
Please remove the GFDL from the list of licenses. We really should _never_ have images which are only under the GFDL. The GFDL is completely unsuitable for such materials due to the requirement to reprint the full license with every use. There is no dispute about this as far as I know -- GFDL/CC-BY-SA dual licensing is the preferred option.
Here's a thought: Let people mail their images, descriptions, and license to a central e-mail directly. Volunteers could then upload them after checking.
Free form e-mail is difficult to process because every mail looks different. It also makes it more difficult to collaborate using interfaces like FlickrLickr.
Erik