romulusnr
09/29/05 04:56 PM
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I asked this over at the image for "600 barrels of gold found on Crusoe Island" (a dupe) http://googleglobetrotting.com/info.php/mid/9922 ...
The initial thumbnail for that submission had a big curly dotted white line leading to a big white Maltese cross... in other words, like an "X marks the spot" map in a kid's pirate story. This clearly was not part of the GMaps imagery.  I asked if this sort of thing was acceptable, because it seems inappropriate.
Kjfitz suggested that admins generally accept small arrows, circles, and crosses that are helpful and meaningful (pointing out a specific spot). I would suggest that these sorts of things should be kept to a minimum and only used when the object in question is not (for whatever reason) the main object in the thumbnail. In any case, the image of Crusoe Island for the submission was changed to one without the decorations.
I also suggest that acceptable thumbnail modifications include anything that improves clarity, such as gamma correction (I just submited a gamma-corrected version of Crusoe Island, so you can actually SEE the island, the difference is striking) and maybe post-resize sharpening in the case of a significant resize.
I would also think that while a little bit of image stretching is sometimes useful, (especially in areas where the angled satellite photos make circles look like ovals) it should be done only slightly.
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kjfitz
09/29/05 05:28 PM
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Thanks for starting the conversation, romulusnr. I think you've pretty accurately summarized the current thinking of the moderators.
My philosphy is "live and let live" but there are a couple of things I'll reject without a thought.
One is going to be words. I think people should keep captions and descriptions in the title and description fields.
I'm pretty lenient about (and sometimes myself) using Google Earth images in the thumbnail WHEN the scene in Google Maps is the same and high res. I'll always reject a map whose thumbnail shows a high res image but that location in Google Maps is low res. (nic is considering adding a Google Earth only area so there may come a time when submissions like tis are fine. Not yet though.)
I also don't like rotated images though I've been guilty of rotating a few city names or logos to make them clearer to read.
I also reject thumbnails that don't have source whatsoever with Google Maps (i.e. they are photographs of the target or are thumbnails taken from Terraserver or the like.)
When in doubt just post what you've got and add a comment in the comments field or at the TOP ofthe description field and we can discuss it.
kjfitz
Virtual Globetrotting Moderator
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romulusnr
09/29/05 08:00 PM
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Quote:
I'll always reject a map whose thumbnail shows a high res image but that location in Google Maps is low res.
I wasn't aware that this happened, I thought GMaps and GEarth used the same sat data...!
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kjfitz
09/29/05 08:53 PM
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No, Google Earth has quite a bit more coverage and they expanded it even more last week. The Google Earth coverage is often different for the same place too. A lot of the airplane in flight URLs for instance have no airplane there in Google Earth.
kjfitz
Virtual Globetrotting Moderator
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