Uploading photos to Web

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Permalink Reply by Michael Vosburg on April 3, 2008 at 9:53am

OK. Here's my question. Why is greater quantity and poorer quality a good thing? How does making readers slog through a ton of crap reward them for their time and encourage them to come back?

Just because the web gives us room to write 80 inches about a city council meeting does not mean that we should. If you are a writer, you should make every inch count. The same goes for photos. Put up the memorable, the interesting, the informative. Leave everything else on the cutting room floor. Your site will be better for it.

I can't speak for anyone else, but, yes, I tone EVERY photo.

By the way, far from a stupid question, this cuts right to critical philosophy on how to best use the web.

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Permalink Reply by William Cannon on June 16, 2008 at 6:09pm

Don't tone every photo. The advantage with online is that you can post now, tone later, and replace the original image. Build the visual, print and video report online as the readers watch. Let them see things come together in the final package.

That doesn't mean junk is o.k., but it means that a work in progress is just that. As long as the content and quality continues to improve, the readers will continue to refresh.

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Permalink Reply by Ryan Mercer on September 3, 2008 at 7:45pm

Hi Susan,

I think there is a balance between what Michael and William mentioned, but no doubt when you post more of anything you are going to be getting into more work. But here is the deal, no matter what I might think as a photographer, the web is different than print. People view photos differently online, digest information differently, and to try and insist that quality is always at 100% is not realistic, especially at smaller papers.
That said, you don't want "crap" either as Michael put it, but the definition of "crap" is very very different from a reader's point of view.
Staff stuff should not be as big a problem, especially if your photographers can create macros to batch tone things like sporting events where the same conditions might make a one one-fit tone for all possible. And, they will just be faster in general so they should be able to produce at least a dozen photos within an hour of a sporting event lets say (Assuming they are organized, are transmitting and don't have drive anywhere like back to the office.) They should also be using Photo Mechanic to caption, much faster than Photoshop. They can also batch save photo at web res which will speed up posting to Flickr or anywhere online. If you don't have it, you should get it.
But, the more you want, the more time it will take. So you'll have to determine how much resource you can through at this. There are good models that tell us that readers will wait if they know and are used to you doing a certain thing over and over. Say, two hours after each sporting event there will be a gallery of 20 to 30 images online and no matter what, the gallery will be there, every time, from every HS game you cover. You'll train readers -- are pretty quickly -- to go to the site around that time. And you may have to make compromises, like batch captions for extra images, things that will reduce work load time.
But the idea that a small amount of fantastically toned images will drive the numbers is pretty unrealistic. Online readers want as much as you can give them, the real question is how much can you give them without dropping below the quality threshold you want to maintain.

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