Photoless pubs map - some improvements?

[sheffield hatter]

Hi Dave,

I wanted to let you know how useful I have found the pubs without photos map. I often use it to plan trips and large areas of the country now have no pubs without photos. There are still 3,500 out there waiting for photographers, though!

When planning trips this way I often switch to the regular pub maps and try to find pubs near my initial route that have either very few photos, or old photos, or photos of pubs where the name has since changed, or just not very good photos. But this can be fairly laborious as it means clicking on each pub's page and looking at the photos, then switching back to the map.

Would it be possible to improve the process with what I hope could be fairly simple tweaks? (Ever the optimist. )

1) Users notice that a pub's photos are in that "in need of an update" status that I mentioned above. They then suppress them from appearing on a pub's summary page by clicking a button on the photos page. At the moment this is only available to a) the owner of the photo, and b) authorised admin users. I suggest changing to a "suppress photo" button visible to and usable by all members. The people in categories A and B above could be joined by any registered users, but they would also have to give a reason for the suppression, and this would then be referred to an admin for action. (Reasons could include i) more than five years old; ii) change of name; iii) radical change of appearance; iv) interior view (including beers, people, features and notices); v) poor quality shot (including lighting, weather, skewiff); vi) clutter (scaffolding, street furniture, road traffic, parked cars or people dominating the image); vii) other - please specify.) The aim here is for a general improvement of the appearance of the pubs on the site. I think this would be a useful feature even if the next stage can't be implemented at the same time.

2) At the moment, if a pub has no photos displayed, the image pane on the summary page has a button underneath saying "view older pictures", and in the area page there is a blank photo pane which stands out quite nicely. But it would also be useful if this information could carry forward to the photoless pubs map. I imagine that two features would be useful. First would be a different coloured map point for pubs that do have photos, but they have all been suppressed. Second would be a series of check boxes so that users could see either pubs with no photos at all, or pubs with all photos suppressed, or both categories. (I say "a series of check boxes" because of the ideas I want to develop below.)

3) The name change facility has been a useful addition to the site, but it could maybe do with an enhancement. I'm thinking that some changes are trivial, like the addition of the definite article, correction of errors like Blue Bell when Bluebell is correct, or just corrections of typos and incorrect spellings. If we could identify actual name changes that are substantial enough to make a new photo necessary to reflect the pub's current appearance, perhaps this could automatically suppress the photos prior to the date of change, or if that is too tricky then some way of drawing the attention of the admin team to suppress them manually. (If this feature could be introduced we could maybe have a clean up operation to mark the substantial changes and then rely on this suppression being done when a name change is completed in future.) This would then become a separate category on the photoless pubs map, so a third map point colour and another check box.

4) If possible, a subtle but useful change might be that all five year old photos would prompt a further map point colour on the photoless pubs map, but without the photos being suppressed. In other words, the "need" for a new photo could be visible to potential photographers on the map without the existing photos over five years old being suppressed from the summary page, but only if they have no other reason(s) for suppression.)

Phew! That was a bit more than I anticipated writing when I sat down to it.

Hope you can see your way to doing some at least of this.

Thanks again for everything you do.

Will