Cover photos

Just launched a new feature in the guide; cover photos.

I'll add it to a bunch of articles, but you can already see the result here: Famous National Parks

It's available to guide moderators (Respected Members and above). The link is at the bottom of the article to Edit Cover Photo. You will get a screen with suggested photos and the option to search for other ones if nothing good is in that selection. Click on a photo, select which area to crop to and hit Done.

I think it does quite a bit to help the visual appeal of the guides Let me know what you all think!

Wow, really does help with the visual appeal. I stuck a naked guy up on Oslo's one

Looks nice Peter!

The examples it gives are not always right though.
For Montenegro it just gives 3 featured ones and for Kosovo one!

Also, one of my Faroe Islands photos is at the Denmark gallery as one to manual include. While it is in the Faroe Islands gallery in the photography page....

Guess it would make sense to have the examples for countries linked with the country featured photo gallery, while for other geographical places it could be linked to the one you would get when searching in the photography page for featured ones for that specific place. Now it's only the latter one for all places including countries. Hope this makes sense

The search for photos is quite flexible - it's basically using the same logic as the main photo search function. So it looks at the title, description, etc.. not so much just the location. This sometimes provides better results, sometimes worse

To help provide other ways of finding photos, there's also that form there so you can search for different phrases. You can get really specific with that search and just search by the title of the photo you want (optionally ticking "include non-featured ones" )

Also, the photos returned are only ones that are actually capable of being a cover photo. In particular, they have to be big enough, at least 640px wide and 320px high. So if you notice some photos missing, that might be why.

Quoting Peter

The search for photos is quite flexible - it's basically using the same logic as the main photo search function. So it looks at the title, description, etc.. not so much just the location. This sometimes provides better results, sometimes worse

To help provide other ways of finding photos, there's also that form there so you can search for different phrases. You can get really specific with that search and just search by the title of the photo you want (optionally ticking "include non-featured ones" )

Also, the photos returned are only ones that are actually capable of being a cover photo. In particular, they have to be big enough, at least 640px wide and 320px high. So if you notice some photos missing, that might be why.

I did. For example for Albania, I tried to search for my photo which is featured of the Rozafa castle or a mosque in Shkodra. Doesn't come up with anything.
On the other hand, at the Utrecht (city) page, it gives all my photos from here to the other end of the world, so it searches on membername as well lol.

Montenegro has quite a few featured ones, but comes up with 3 photos just. At least it should include the ones that are featured in the country gallery. Same applies for search terms like Prizren and Pristina in Kosovo. Nothing, while there are featured ones.
The thing is that sometimes when adding it as a location it gives totally different names, in different (local sometimes) languages.
Oh well...

Both those photos (the mosque and castle) are vertically orientated so they are not wide enough to be used as a cover photo. That's why they weren't showing in the search results.

And yeah, maybe I should exclude usernames when searching. It can be a bit odd, most noticeably in the case of Utrecht

And just checked another of your examples - in the Montenegro gallery also there are only 3 that are large enough. There are a couple of other landscape orientated photos, but they are not available wide enough to use in this situation.

Quoting Peter

Both those photos (the mosque and castle) are vertically orientated so they are not wide enough to be used as a cover photo. That's why they weren't showing in the search results.

And yeah, maybe I should exclude usernames when searching. It can be a bit odd, most noticeably in the case of Utrecht

LOL, indeed!
But did not know about the vertically orientated photos. Makes sense yes

Nice function. Would it be possible to select a couple of them, so that they can rotate?

And one other remark, in some places with a large name and a clearification in brackets, the title is blocking a large part of the picture. (see Madrid (autonomous community) as an example.) I am not sure if there are even longer titles, that would become partly unreadible as the end would disappear. But would it be an option if the part in brackets would be of a smaller fontsize?

[ Edit: Edited on 24-Mar-2012, at 06:15 by Herr Bert ]

One improvement: Put the image url between double quotes, so that a stray closing bracket ")" in the filename doesn't end the CSS url() rule prematurely. (See Uluru.)