Picnshot.com - FREE images website review

Hey there,
my name is Michael and about a week ago I have created a website called Picnshot.com where I give away for free high resolution photos for commercial & personal use. I would love to have opinion of as many people as possible as to the website's design, build and most importantly the photos themselves. In general, what to better or change.

The main point is that I love photography and love to share my pics with others.

Please let me know, I am open to any ideas.

Thanks, Michael J.

 

I would think about adding a categories section and a search feature. Nice work though.

 

1. The images are a bit too big for my taste, 10MB (4000x2660px) is an overkill for me. Although some may find it useful.
2. Agree with the poster above. Start your site right. Separate your images by categories. Your user-friendliness will go up by 500%.
3. Put a nice pic of yourself in the about page.
4. If you can add "like", "favor", "comment" options to each image that would be great (if you're not sure what I mean by that check out https://pixabay.com/)
5. Add the pinterest share button to each image, so that anyone could pin your images to their pinterest page.

 

Hey guys, thanks a lot for your ideas. They're really awesome! I just added categories to the sidebar and a pinterest button to each image/post. Can you check it out, if its alright?

About the size, I really want people to be able to even use the images for print, yet all and all anything, that's why the size is like this. My own pic is a nice idea, just gotta make one

But I'm really not sure about comments, since I don't want registration etc., I'm not sure if it would work the right way. Can you give me some advice about that?

Thanks, Michael

 

Ideally, you'd need a registration for that to avoid excessive spam (spam commenting). It was really just an idea. Maybe you can look into that again as the site grows. It's not a must-have as of now. Eventually, if you want to retain more visitors (and create returning visitors), you may want to put like / favorite / comment options in place.

 

Thanks a lot for the idea, I'll think about the comments option. And what about likes etc.? You mean facebook likes, or some other...?

 

Anybody got any more ideas? Need critics, urgent!

Thanks, Michael

 

Hey there,
me again I'd like some info about as to why people don't actually sign in for the newsletter about new photos at www.picnshot.com + visitor number issue(about only 30 unique users/day). Anybody any advice?

Thanks in advance,
Michael

 

Does anybody else have any ideas, comments or critics about the website above (picnshot.com)?

Thanks, M.

 

Well, first up it took 27 seconds to load, and a good ten seconds of that was just sitting here looking at a blank page. If I wasn't reviewing the site, I'd have bounced long before I ever even saw your subscription box.

Really from a content delivery perspective in terms of what the site is for -- images -- you've chosen completely the wrong tool. You're using turdpress -- a blogging system -- to try and create a gallery. This means that on a 1920x1080 display I'm lucky if I can see more than one image at a time. You're using the full size image with browser scaling instead of smaller faster-loading thumbnails, hence it taking forever just to see the handful of images per page, and on the whole the "browsing experience" for getting through the few images you have up is the antithesis of good user interface design.

Laughably the unoptimized full size non-thumbnail images aren't even what's chewing up most of the load time -- it's the RIDICULOUS amount of scripttardery and CSS whatever rubbish off the shelf turdpress template that is has saddled you with. Turdpress by itself is bad enough a laundry list of how NOT to build a website, being little more than a scam for nubes and rubes... but you mix in outright scam artist BS like "jetpack", endless pointless presentational style in the markup, presentational classes, and the pinnacle of scripttardery known as jQuery, and it's hardly a shock the result is a bloated slow mess that I'd be shocked if it even sees legitimate traffic!

Ripley had it right; nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

I would advise pitching that entire mess in the trash, and getting someone who knows something about websites to help you built a legitimate site properly without all the goofy nube-predating off the shelf rubbish. There is little if anything I'd be trying to salvage from that mess.

Oh, and your actual content -- the images -- seem a bit washed out and/or overexposed... and somewhat out of focus as if you're using a telephoto for the close ups and macro lenses for the long shots... Are those scans from print or have you not level adjusted them for emissive colourspace and left them at their CMYK norms? I think they need a good "equalize" and possibly a hint of negative gamma.

All in all it would be WAY more useful if you had actual high res versions of the images (like 2560 width) linked to by thumbnails in the 160 to 256 px width, with multiple thumbs (like say 12 to 24) in a normal gallery layout instead of the massive spread of five slow loading items per page in a mediocre middle resolution.

 

Thanks a lot for your comment and sorry for the late response.

Seems to me a little bit, as you being kinda anti-wordpress-y No problem with that, I understand your point, although I cannot agree with the 27sec loading time-> never experienced that, neither I didn't have any other comment about that, except yours.

More than this I appreciate your comment about the photos themselves, could you maybe describe it for me a little more?

And of course I am open to any more ideas/comments/critics, so please go on!

Here are some new updates:

1) It takes your time to actually download all the images and sometimes you just dont want to browse all of them, but get them all-in-one and that's where this tool comes in. For just $3 you can get a whole pack of (right now) 40 high-res images in just a few clicks. It's a banner on the right side, processed via gumroad.

2) I also changed the layout of the header and categories, so if you'd give it a look, it would be awesome. + many pictures came in since the last post, so be sure to check them out and tell me what do you think.

Thanks a lot!

Michael
www.picnshot.com

 

He just doesn't like anyone doing anything different than him.

He thinks we should all be master coders who can create an entire website from scratch.

He laughs at anyone who can't.

 

Thanks Matthew, I thought it would be something like that. I chose the platform, because it fits my needs and has functions that are crucial for me and can't create them myself.

 

No, what I don't like is people ignoring accessibility norms, ignoring bandwidth limitations, ignoring specifications and guidelines...

Oh, wait, no... you're right. I actually pay attention to those things, it's clear most other people have no malfing clue what they even MEAN.

It's not "master coding" to at least expect legible colour contrasts, speedy page loads and accessibility.

Well, more like tries to teach them, encourage them to get help, and if they are unwilling to do either suggest that MAYBE this isn't a field they should be working in. Of course such suggestions can be depressing for those starting out, more depressing for the people who think everything will be magically handed to them on a silver platter... but most of all, upsets the sleazy fly by night scam artist dirtbags who prey upon the ignorance of "all of the above".

Internally it has little to no security relying on a single ring of protection, it's filled with sloppy "insecure by design" practices like dumping the SQL connection data into DEFINE, and the default front end code is such an ineptly developed train wreck that nobody who understands HTML or CSS would use it by choice... the off the shelf templates from the sleazeball whorehouses like Themeforest or TemplateMonster only continuing to exist because there's as much money to be made duping the ignorant fools who think it can all be done off the shelf into forking over cash for vague promises -- much akin to the dietary supplements you find on foodie websites or snake oil peddling common to the anti-vaxxer crowd. It all generally has the legitimacy of late night infomercials and pyramid scam asshattery like Mary Kay or Amway.

I've also just spent the better part of a week helping people who just got utterly and completely ****ed by it like they dropped the soap in a prison shower, only further proving my point over how it's the wrong tool for anything more complex than a blog for grandma. Whilst not entirely turdpress' fault since the exploit is spread by browser plugins, those plugins got their foot in the door and once anything gets behind that one ring of protection - you might was well just paint the bullseye on yer arse.

One of the hardest lessons to learn about websites is it's never about how fast it is for you -- it can seem blazingly fast one moment, agonizingly slow the next. Your own caching can delude you into thinking it's faster than it ever would be the first time someone visits the site.

It seems much faster today, I suspect you may have upped the encoding on the jpeg or something? Still, this:


Does not paint a rosy picture. That there's more scripttardery on the page than there are images ON A IMAGE SITE doesn't speak well of it, particularly when I'm not seeing ANYTHING that should even have scripting associated with it! The real telltale is cached vs. uncached, and the file counts. Right now it's ping-ponging between 12 and 20 seconds on a cache-clean first-load. MOST of that isn't even your file sizes anymore, which seem better, but the actual number of separate files... again those 22 separate scripts being most of the problem.

For every file on a website there's a process called "handshaking" -- as a "rule of thumb" for making a "quick guesstimate" you treat the first eight files as "free", and then use a 200ms (1/5th of a second) per file to determine the "real world ideal" load time. In your case with 52 files, just under nine seconds should be the "average".

The thing is, that's ideal -- assuming no network congestion, low server load, that the user on the other end isn't facing their own connection limit crunch... public access at the bagel shop? Wifey watching netflix in the next room? Rugrat spanking it to torrents with their bedroom door locked? Wrong side of a nationwide backbone divide? Yeah, kiss that ideal goodbye.

Which is why each file could be a second or more. People reporting on otherwise fast connections could see 50 seconds or more on that page. Admittedly, that's worst case, but certainly not unexpected.

... and really you take something like that 14 seperate CSS files coming to a ape-shit ridiculous 278k of code? On a site that to be frank, I'd be shocked needs more than 24k of CSS to do the exact same job as is? NOT a good thing.

But entirely what one can expect when off the shelf answers are slapped together any-old-way.

Well, in terms of browsing the site, it sucks to be stuck with one image per PAGE at 1920x1080... how is that useful? There's a reason image galleries create smaller "thumnail" images in lower resolutions -- so you can quickly see a dozen or more images quickly to decide which ones you want to see. It's kind of a given for a gallery site and you have nothing like that present. Those thumbnails usually then link to higher resolution copies.

When you seem to be using middle-resolution copies for everything. Useless as stock images due to the low resolution, painful bandwidth wasting and making it harder to browse quickly thanks to being too high a resolution. The "download free now" hiding the options makes an extra step a lot of users won't actually follow, expecting your three options of full size and intermediate resolutions to just be there since you already have a massive image (by website standards) on the index.

Even sticking with wordpress, an ACTUAL gallery of thumbnails would be far more interesting. You don't see Google image search or Youtube using massive images as one column five per page.

In terms of image quality -- it all looks very flat, washed out, out of focus... Take that new one of the waffles. It looks like someone used a telephoto lens at a distance to take what should have been done with a macro lens and a ringlight. The lighting of the composition results in massive lost of detail on things like the wood grain, the colour is pretty well sucked out of the strawberry filling... and really the whole scene is very poorly lit. It's not what I'd call a good composition.

Little bot running in the woods -- again washed out to the point it looks more like a faded polaroid than a modern picture. The snap focus used can't even keep anything more than the hair in focus which starts to reek of being done with a disposable 35mm camera 80's style.

... and those tomatoes look like they could have used another week on the counter before being cut. I suspect that's more the fault of the composition and camera being used than the actual components of the scene... though at least in this case the primary article is in focus and the out of focus surroundings are sound to the composition. I just think a hue adjustment to yank some of the blue and green off that would help...

Across all the images some level equalization would work wonders. THAT's the type of thing Photoshop and other paint programs were meant to do -- a bit of post-processing to deal with the fact that digital camera's suck at consistent colour reproduction; and not all scenes look at as nice on a picture as they did when the eye sees it.

Sorry, but having worked with product photography and in dealing with miniatures and other types of macro photography, these types of details drive me nuts. It looks like the stuff I did as a amateur on a webcam a decade and a half ago. Almost as if you're using the stock lens in a cell phone or other cheap camera with zero concern for focus or lighting. Could be worse though -- with miniatures photography using macro lenses and the proper lighting EVERY imperfection that you'd never see with the naked eye stands out like a sore thumb, so often you have to apply filtering to make the image crappy to get rid of that.

It's a painful lose/lose depending on the subject matter.

But like that picture with the kid, a little equalization and colour correction on it -- lemme do that quick to the lowest res version...

http://www.cutcodedown.com/for_others/repik/adjusted.jpg

That's just a quick equalization, contrast restore and saturation adjustment. Admittedly it damages the out of focus background, but it restores the colour of the shirt both in the greens and blues, makes the kid no longer be sickly pale, and brings out the foliage colours.

Though that's what some people in the industry called "Europe vs. US colours". Some movies and video games are even deployed with the colour saturation boosted in the US and desaturated in Europe just because of the difference in "grey perception". (Gothic 4 Arcania comes to mind)

 

Apple has a problem with their grey color perception. They have 3 types of grey: dark, darker, darkererererer.