What filetype do you save your scans as?

[ReiTheJelly]

I save my files as JPEG. I save standard cels at 650 pixels wide and oversized cels at whatever size I feel like (usually 750 wide for horizontal pans, and maybe 500 wide for vertical pans). The reason I do this...I have a REALLY old monitor from 2001 that is only 1024x768. I also have a laptop with higher screen resolution, but I don't use it much anymore now that I'm not in school.

[HigurashiArchives]

It really annoys me when people use the "I'm really busy and it's a free service" excuse to not pay attention to their users. This excuse just serves to make the users feel bad about asking the person running the service to do their job. It's kind of like me baking you a pie, and in that pie I put the most Delicious fruits and spices, then after baking it I place a hardened white dog poop right on top. You'd probably say "Hey this pie is nice but I can't eat this!" then I would say "Hey it's a free pie! You have no right to complain! Besides, baking a pie is hard and I'm really busy!"

I would like your input if possible, I'm making an online artbook where users submit items from their collections and write a little bit about it. Then other users can comment on it and upload their own items. I think the beauty of it is in it's simplicity. Also it will give you stats about what websites are linking to your images as well as a more accurate view counter which only counts "unique" views. As stated before the max filesize is 2MB and the max width is actually unlimited. I want to stress quality over quantity and I want the focus of the website to be on the artwork itself.

Regardless, in order for my website to succeed I'll need to address this image thief issue. Hmm...

I guess I'm one of those people who knows that I can't do better myself, and if I could, I would have done it long ago. And, I like having a more centralized place to find images from all sorts of shows rather than depending on Google to find everything for me. I know that without RS, I wouldn't have an online gallery, or if I did, it would have all sorts of jainky issues due to my inability to understand coding.

I suppose I could read "HTML for Dummies" or something like that, but...I know I'll never get halfway through it.

Too bad pie wouldn't convince Jason to hurry up with the improvements. I can make a mean pie....though it might not be much of one after it goes through the postal system.

I don't know if a centralized location would work. We have the Anime-Beta Gallery on RS, but I don't know if anything's been done with that lately.

I agree, I've always felt the same way: "If I can do better I will try." Here is my try: http://art.tsubasa.us I'd be honored if anyone from this community would give it a try! I really think we can create something really beautiful, informative and fun! I would love any and all feedback anyone would be willing to give! I created this over the course of about 3 weekends working from scratch in notepad! If the community responds favorably I have some pretty neat ideas for the site which I've never seen done before for our community.

[JWR]

Well as Jason does say he wrote all the code for Rubberslug himself and built it then offered it to the community free off charge. Then a couple of years ago he dedicated 5 months to rewrite and upgrade the site in which during that time he did not accept any other paying work. I really don't know many that would be willing to go without a paycheck for almost half a year for something that will never generate any income.

Did he run out of time to do all the upgrades and finish all the functions before the real life need to earn money took over? Yes, but since he launched the new version many of the big faults of the previous version have been fixed. Other than a few days a couple of weeks ago when a power supply failed and a couple of outside hack attacks RS has been up and working reliable which was not the case before.

Is it perfect? No but for the vast majority who either do not have the computer skills to write and build their our site or prefer to use a ready made site that was given to the comunity for free RS is a godsend.

[HigurashiArchives]

Well as Jason does say he wrote all the code for Rubberslug himself and built it then offered it to the community free off charge. Then a couple of years ago he dedicated 5 months to rewrite and upgrade the site in which during that time he did not accept any other paying work. I really don't know many that would be willing to go without a paycheck for almost half a year for something that will never generate any income.

Did he run out of time to do all the upgrades and finish all the functions before the real life need to earn money took over? Yes, but since he launched the new version many of the big faults of the previous version have been fixed. Other than a few days a couple of weeks ago when a power supply failed and a couple of outside hack attacks RS has been up and working reliable which was not the case before.

Is it perfect? No but for the vast majority who either do not have the computer skills to write and build their our site or prefer to use a ready made site that was given to the comunity for free RS is a godsend.

I do need to apologize I had no intention of insulting Rubberslug or its creator, just the "They're doing it for free so I have no right to complain when stuff doesn't work" way of thinking. Anyway, I'm proposing a new way of displaying our collections here in a simplistic manner which I think has a lot of pontential. It actually was designed to augment your rubberslug account by allowing you to have your most significant artwork more prominent. I guess simply put, if Rubberslug is Facebook, art.tsubasa.us is twitter.

[sensei]

I scan all my artwork at 300 dpi and save it as JPEG. That means the original scans are something like 3200 x 2500 pixels (larger when I baste together scans of oversized or pan images). These go into a set of special folders on my hard drive, which are backed up automatically onto an external hard drive. Then I resize these scans to the 550 px maximum taken by RS and save them in a subfolder (titled "Smaller"). These are the ones that I upload, but I retain the larger scans for reference. It seems a workable routine, and personally I'm not bothered by the limitations on scans in RS. To properly appreciate the art, you'd need to see it first-hand, possibly with a loupe in hand, but when I'm just browsing a fellow collector's holdings, I'm perfectly satisfied with a 550 px. image.

I would appreciate it if I could upload new scans as some of the ones in my gallery (especially early sketch acquisitions) are pretty iffy. But for the whole I'm appreciative of a platform that is as simple to use and relatively flexible as RS.

[JuniorMintKiss]

As with sensei, I also scan my cels at 300 dpi, and save it as JPEG. However, due to my internet connectivity, it's touch and go with downloading large files. I open my files in Photoshop and minimize my scans down to 96 dpi. I use Auto Levels and Auto Contrast to perk up the colors of my scans, then save it as as a large file -Quality High (8) - under Image Options.

[zerospace]

I do need to apologize I had no intention of insulting Rubberslug or its creator, just the "They're doing it for free so I have no right to complain when stuff doesn't work" way of thinking. Anyway, I'm proposing a new way of displaying our collections here in a simplistic manner which I think has a lot of pontential. It actually was designed to augment your rubberslug account by allowing you to have your most significant artwork more prominent. I guess simply put, if Rubberslug is Facebook, art.tsubasa.us is twitter.

While I'm not really on-board with your total idea for this web site, I understand and appreciate your sentiment & cannot say that I disagree with you regarding Rubberslug. You are simply voicing something I've thought for a long time, sadly. I generally keep my mouth shut on the matter, because I realize, as a web developer myself, I am in the minority. I believe my own perspective as a developer makes me judge RS more harshly than most.

WARNING ... RANT AHEAD: (don't say I didn't warn you -- this goes for you JWR!)

I have to say that defending the sorry state that Rubberslug is in currently is just sad to me. Jason has all but abandoned it -- I'd have thought most of you would have realized that by now. I totally appreciate what Jason has done for the community, but perhaps it is time to stop the blind loyalty & wake up and realize that RS has seen better days, and probably never will return to the awesomeness of its heyday. Is that an insult? No. It's just the truth. If the truth is insulting, well... that, IMHO, says a lot.

I don't know about HirurashiArchives, but I know I am personally capable of building something like RS, so I feel like I at least have a leg to stand on when I speak here. I likely have more of a clue than most of you of what it would take to build and run a site like Rubberslug -- and believe me, I commend Jason for ever even doing it, but there is a point at which that stops, and that point was long before today for me. It saddens me that he still accepts donations but hardly ever works on the site anymore -- it seems the only time he comes around to do anything is when something breaks completely. New members have no idea of this, and what if they make a pretty hefty donation only to find out that the owner doesn't really support the site anymore? I'd hate to be that person.

From the perspective of anyone without much knowledge of RS's history, here's some of what we see:

- Days of downtime because of a dead power supply on the physical server
- Days of being unable to upload images because the server continually runs out of disk space
- Forum posts don't work if there is any punctuation in the title
- Site forms indicate GIF, JPG, etc upload, and yet JPG is the only one that works.
- You can't truly delete anything (cannot empty the trash for your gallery).

At least I can say that it's been a long, long time since RS was hacked & nearly destroyed by bots filling everything with virus-laden embedded content and links.

I realize how harsh this sounds, but I'm just saying that I think it's not right to jump on HirurashiArchives simply because he/she doesn't worship Jason and RS the way many of you do. If you consider the above situations from a relatively-newbie perspective, you can quickly understand someone's frustration. And taking offense to someone beginning another project that would work as an alternative to Rubberslug is just silly. Perhaps a little competition might spark Jason's interest in fixing what's wrong with RS. I've even considered building a community-oriented version of my own gallery software for others to use, but for now have settled for hosting individual galleries for people.

And one last side note: If you have no web skills... folks... there are so many what-you-see-is-what-you-get web editing tools nowadays that there's almost no excuse. You can still use a free host -- most of them have these tools available. Back in the day we had the cels webring & a bunch of free hosted sites ... perhaps what we need is a central site like Cels.org used to be to tie everyone together again. Heck, I think even I'd be up for building that!

And now that ya'll hate me, I'll duck outta here before the rotten fruit & vegetables start flying.

[JWR]

No Zerospace, I don't hate you for your rant for you are entitled to your opinions. There are not many who have the computer skills you have so you can rightly be proud of the work you put into your online gallery.

As far as rubberslug goes, it is a tool given to those who wish to use it. No one holds a gun to one's head and forces them. If someone else comes along and builds a "better mousetrap" and people choose to use that then they are free to do so.

The only thing I will disagree with is your term that I and others "Worship" Jason. What I am is appreciative he was willing to be the pioneer by seeing a need and creating Rubberslug then putting it out there for all that wish to use it without a fee. I know that becuse of Rubberslug and Beta I have been exposed to a lot of great artwork that otherwise none of us but the owner would have ever seen and through both made many close friends.

[jcaliff]

Back to the original question, I also scan at 300 dpi and save as jpeg, then I use batch editing scripts in gimp to rescale and watermark. I keep all my original scans in a separate directory on my home computer, and only upload the edited versions. I'm still working on getting things scanned and edited. My goal is to eventually rescan everything, but it's slow going.

As far as RS is concerned, I've never been thrilled by it, and have always kept my comprehensive gallery on my own site, though I do have a small RS gallery mainly to serve as a pointer to my regular site for people who really only browse RS.

[sensei]

For someone with ten years' of scanning and annotation work invested in RS, it would take considerably more advantages of an alternative site and considerably more disadvantages of the current one to convince me to move. The last total "gallery crawl" I did took two months to visit each item once, and so I'd imagine that the work of transferring all the info and images over to a new site would take close to a year. It may well be that for someone starting an online gallery a new site and set of procedures might well lead to a better product ten years down the road. We are moving from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 (smart phone oriented) after all. But for grizzlebeards like myself, a site that can be made to do what I want it to do with (relatively) few bugs is worth sticking with. Just my 50 yen.

[HigurashiArchives]

Wow I think reopened some old wounds here... All I really wanted to do was get someone, anyone really to try my website and give some feedback. As I said it was never intended to replace or even encroach upon what rubberslug does. My website isn't a gallery website at all, its an artbook. Well regardless I do care a lot about what this community thinks and feels, if they don't feel that it's art.tsubasa's time to shine, i'll scrap it, simple as that. It was made as a way to make some of the special items that may be buried in you gallery's more prominent and you can talk about it at length with a forum like feedback system. I don't realistically expect or want anyone to bring their whole gallery over, that's not what the website was made for.
All in all I found that there was a difficulty with displaying artwork in a way that was easy, and I thought the idea of creating a huge artbook with all of everyone's favorite art work as well as the ability to comment and talk about the art on the same page was really neat. I based the design of the entire site off of this thread: viewtopic.php?f=70&t=29324

Regardless, I'm really sorry I didn't mean to insult anyone. I still do hope someone is willing to at least give this online artbook idea a try. http://art.tsubasa.us

We are moving from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 (smart phone oriented) after all. But for grizzlebeards like myself, a site that can be made to do what I want it to do with (relatively) few bugs is worth sticking with. Just my 50 yen.

Oh, art.tsubasa is CSS3 compatable and should work with all major mobile browsers.

[sensei]

Don't think you need to scrap it: as you say, it's a different type of online display. The gripes about RS have deeper roots and shouldn't be taken as criticisms of your idea. Who knows: in this fast-forward age maybe both RS and AB will be part of the nostalgic past before we know it. (Like cel-based animation ... )

[ginga123]

jpeg.

i know for a fact that one of my scans is hot-linked on some web site somewhere out in moonie land. it's got a whopping 2k hits and counting. wish i could do something about that particular item. same problem for what was the least popular section of what is on display. i've tried everything from water-marking to "do not right click" codes.

[HigurashiArchives]

jpeg.

i know for a fact that one of my scans is hot-linked on some web site somewhere out in moonie land. it's got a whopping 2k hits and counting. wish i could do something about that particular item. same problem for what was the least popular section of what is on display. i've tried everything from water-marking to "do not right click" codes.

Ah that stinks I'm sorry to hear that. Hotlinking is fairly easy to defeat if you have access to the server though, you can also figure out who is linking to your stuff by viewing the server logs. I don't know what your level of access to your server is though but if your interested let me know I'll help you out.

[zerospace]

jpeg.

i know for a fact that one of my scans is hot-linked on some web site somewhere out in moonie land. it's got a whopping 2k hits and counting. wish i could do something about that particular item. same problem for what was the least popular section of what is on display. i've tried everything from water-marking to "do not right click" codes.

Ah that stinks I'm sorry to hear that. Hotlinking is fairly easy to defeat if you have access to the server though, you can also figure out who is linking to your stuff by viewing the server logs. I don't know what your level of access to your server is though but if your interested let me know I'll help you out.

Except she isn't talking about real "hotlinking" (unless you call posting a link to a web page 'hotlinking', which is NOT CORRECT!), and she's talking about a Rubberslug site -- no server access, and where Jason has disabled embedded code execution (a smart move on his part -- cross site scripting attacks aren't good).

All it takes to stop a 'real' hotlinker is the right htaccess file -- no logs required.

EDIT: Wiki page on hotlinking (or inline linking): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking