Recent improvements to the map of pubs that need photographs

[sheffield hatter]

I've just got back from a holiday in various parts of the country, using the recently improved map of pubs without photos. As well as the pubs with no photos at all, there is now a very useful facility where any pubs where all the photos have been excluded from the main page are also flagged. I believe that some of the Seven Dwarfs are leaving at least one photo showing, even if it was pretty poor or had the name of the pub before it had changed. This new tool for locating these pubs now means that it is better to suppress those photos so that photographers can go looking for the pubs. Thanks to Dave for the improvements - it gives me a renewed incentive to get out there.

There is also a facility for finding pubs with photos that are more than five years old. This would be really, really useful if only there weren't so damn many of them - over 20,000! It's kinda hard to see the wood for the trees. I wonder if Dave's AI assistant would be able to provide a filter with either variable ages on a sliding scale from five years to the year dot (which would be July 2004, I think); or some radio buttons for 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. The first option would be cool, because the user could slide the scale while watching the map until a reasonable number of pubs to target on a day in the area appeared. But if the second idea is easier to execute (copy & paste?) then that would be good too.

One minor tweak: when isolating a pub on the map it is possible to click through to the main site. This gives us a chance to check things like, is the pub still open, is the map point correct, or has the CAMRA website also not got a photo, so killing two birds with one stone. The problem is that when going back onto the map the filter for hidden photos or old photos has unticked. I don't know how easy this is to fix. I can "fix it" myself if I remember to open the pub's page in a new tab, by right clicking on the link. As I'm very bad at remembering things like that, can the link be made so that it always opens a new tab?

And here's one for the wish list: on Monday I saw a pub at a road junction that I had stopped at, but it wasn't on my list. On a whim, and as it had stopped raining, I decided to photograph it. When uploading my photos just now it turned out that this pub's only previous photo was of the pub sign, not the building. (This contributor has done numerous photos like this, and I would like to get to some more of them but they're hard to find and he's done 1,797.) Can AI be trained to identify photos of pub signs? And flag the pub when it's the only photo? Just a thought.

Thanks again Dave for all you do for us.

[Quinno]

there is now a very useful facility where any pubs where all the photos have been excluded from the main page are also flagged. I believe that some of the Seven Dwarfs are leaving at least one photo showing, even if it was pretty poor or had the name of the pub before it had changed. This new tool for locating these pubs now means that it is better to suppress those photos so that photographers can go looking for the pubs. Thanks to Dave for the improvements - it gives me a renewed incentive to get out there.

Noted!

[Dave M]

leaving at least one photo showing, even if it was pretty poor or had the name of the pub before it had changed.

I think that was my initial guidance. That was how I was doing things. If hiding them is a good way of helping get a new photo then fair enough.

I seem to recall you suggested previously perhaps we could tie in significant name changes with ages of photo to try to guess when a photo might be stale. Not forgotten about that as I like the idea of still keeping a photo in place but having an easy way to show that we need a new one.

The first option would be cool, because the user could slide the scale while watching the map until a reasonable number of pubs to target on a day in the area appeared. But if the second idea is easier to execute (copy & paste?) then that would be good too.

Both are doable but start to cause strain on the browser if we load too many at once. I need to make it so that you can load more only when zoomed into a town or maybe county sized area

can the link be made so that it always opens a new tab?

Done

Can AI be trained to identify photos of pub signs? And flag the pub when it's the only photo? Just a thought.

I had a stab at this last year at some point, I reckon it got about 80% accuracy which is no use. Take a look at some on this list https://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/hatter/photopubs.php

Things are changing fast with this AI stuff though and I think it can do much better now. If I can get it to be 95%+ accurate then maybe it's useful

[sheffield hatter]

Hi Dave. Thanks for doing the "link opens in a new tab" alteration.

I seem to recall you suggested previously perhaps we could tie in significant name changes with ages of photo to try to guess when a photo might be stale. Not forgotten about that as I like the idea of still keeping a photo in place but having an easy way to show that we need a new one.

I'm not sure it's worth doing when we don't have an accurate date for the change of name. Some name changes result from a photo and/or review being submitted, but a lot of them come from the CAMRA website, or from members looking at pubs with a view to doing a crawl, and finding the name change as a by-product.

Or are you thinking that we could be more proactive about name changes, when a pub has had no photos or reviews for five, 10 or more years?

I appreciate that you prefer to have a photo showing even if it's of a pub with its previous name, but we would need another prompt to get us photographers out there! (There are too many pubs with photos more than five years old, so it would need a separate indicator and something to distinguish a substantial name change from just correcting a typo or adding a definite article.)

I had a stab at this last year at some point, I reckon it got about 80% accuracy which is no use. Take a look at some on this list https://www.pubsgalore.co.uk/hatter/photopubs.php

A few points about this:

The linked document seems to be you asking AI to classify all the photos on a pub into various categories. Maybe a big ask, and maybe you can get a better result now. But is this going to be useful for the site? Are you thinking of automatically hiding photos that are not of the exterior of the pub building? (Pub signs, minor architectural features, interiors, people, gardens, views across the lake, etc.)

My idea was just to identify pubs where the only photo is of a pub sign. If we can find those and pick them up on the photoless pubs map, then we can have a go at getting photos of something other than just the pub sign.

My impression is that there's probably only one contributing photographer who does this, so what about confining the search to his photo uploads and not any others. (This one on your test list is an example.) I reckon it would be quite useful to identify these, as the fact that they have "a photo" signalled in the pub listings discourages photographers from going after them.

So, if these are the only ones we're worried about and there are just 1,797 of them, then 80% accuracy isn't so bad. And also, some of them will already have been supplemented more or less randomly by a photo of the pub building, like my example above. So 20% wrong out of maybe just a thousand is something we could cope with. (Though we would need a way of marking the ones that are erroneous as we go through them. )

And finally, although I've gone on about it quite a bit, this is a fairly small problem and probably not worth your while spending loads of time and energy on! (Unless you expect to get something else out of improving the AI work on the site, of course.)

[Dave M]

I'm not sure it's worth doing when we don't have an accurate date for the change of name. Some name changes result from a photo and/or review being submitted, but a lot of them come from the CAMRA website, or from members looking at pubs with a view to doing a crawl, and finding the name change as a by-product.

I get that in general the data we have isn't quite accurate enough. I'm just kind of thinking out loud on this.

The linked document seems to be you asking AI to classify all the photos on a pub into various categories. Maybe a big ask, and maybe you can get a better result now. But is this going to be useful for the site? Are you thinking of automatically hiding photos that are not of the exterior of the pub building? (Pub signs, minor architectural features, interiors, people, gardens, views across the lake, etc.)

Well yes, I think it would be useful if we could automatically classify things to not show as the main photo of the pub. Plus the nerd in me just thinks it is quite cool and would like to play around with it some more.

My impression is that there's probably only one contributing photographer who does this, so what about confining the search to his photo uploads and not any others. (This one on your test list is an example.) I reckon it would be quite useful to identify these, as the fact that they have "a photo" signalled in the pub listings discourages photographers from going after them.

There is a filter along those lines now.

In fact I (well my 'assistant' Claude) have completely rewritten the photoless pubs page to make it work on mobile a bit better. Including a photo upload option which I have been testing out be getting new photos of pubs that haven't been photographed since 2020. There is a neat cleared section opening up in East Bristol.

Screenshot 2026-03-04 122159.jpg

[sheffield hatter]

In fact I (well my 'assistant' Claude) have completely rewritten the photoless pubs page to make it work on mobile a bit better. Including a photo upload option which I have been testing out be getting new photos of pubs that haven't been photographed since 2020. There is a neat cleared section opening up in East Bristol.

Well done for your cleared section in East Bristol. When you teach 'Claude' to go out there and upload his own photos, that'll be really impressive!

The zoom feature on the photos required map is much better now. Previously it was necessary to zoom in randomly until map points started to appear. Now it is possible to get a better impression of places where there are clusters, that it's worthwhile zooming into, and places like East Bristol where there's nothing to photograph any more.

[sheffield hatter]

There is a filter along those lines now.

But the count of "might be just a sign" pubs is very low at just 49. And one of those has quite a few photos that are not signs at all. I assume that Claude is picking up any photos of signs by the target photographer, but in this instance not only has that photographer also done a standard shot of the pub, but so have two other contributors.

A thought: you have used an add on that hides other map points when the "might be just a sign" option has been picked. Could this be extended (as an option) to the other filters, so that someone who wanted to concentrate on "old photos" (someone in East Bristol, for example) would be able to choose to exclude all other map points?