Images

Before you upload an image, please take note:

Image tips

Avoid duplication

Before you even make a screenshot, please take a look at Basic Procedures and UnrealEd Interface. There are plenty of images of various parts of UnrealEd, so you may be able to reuse those.

File Names

Images are stored in a flat list, so it's important to give your image file a descriptive name.

For tutorials: {name of tutorial page}-{description or number}
Interface screenshots: interface-Ed3-{something descriptive}

(we're using dash (-) as a separator because:

Mychaeel dislikes the use of dots to separate parts of a file name; they are, in his opinion, reserved for the file extension. (and fair enough )
underscores look ugly, especially because they're disproportionally wide in most proportional fonts. They're also a pain to type because they're shifted.)

File Sizes

"800x600" Landscape.

Rough style notes

Tarquin: I'm slowly working on new screenies of the interface. rough notes for common style:

font: Arial 16 plain

Problems

Ugly PNGs in IE

Some Wikipedia logo PNG images on the site are made with an alpha channel. This is so they blend with different colour backgrounds.

Unfortunately, IE does not support PNG alpha channels correctly. Instead of the page background colour, you'll see grey (or some other colour from your Windows appearance settings). So unless you change browsers, you'll get "ugly but functional".

Renaming (admin only)

Tarquin: I'm planning on hacking the wiki script to do regular search & replace, so renaming images should be easier.

Mychaeel: Warning. Abuse of such a feature has the potential to wreck the entire site if it's publicly available. – We could also update the image uploader to enforce certain syntactical rules for image names.

Tarquin: I meant for admin-only: I'll tack it into the page-renaming utility, since it does a S&R itself to update links.

Tarquin: If I rename image files via FTP access, will that upset anything?

Mychaeel: You should rename the previous versions in the "deleted" subdirectory accordingly too, or they'll be "detached" from the current version in the main image directory. Otherwise, nothing bad can happen.

MythOpus: So seeing my ip/hostname on all the deleted pictures are normal :|

Image Management

EntropicLqd: Is there any way of viewing all of the images that have been uploaded to the web site? I'll be needing to upload a bunch of images for the tutorials I'm going to be doing, but don't want to needlessly duplicate images if I don't have to.

Tarquin: The image uploader page lists them all. I can put up a 2nd version of that page that loads all the images too, as thumbnails, but it'll be a long load.

EntropicLqd: That's OK - I have a big pipe . It would be useful. Unless you can think of another way of searching for images.

Tarquin: I have a cigar. I'll fiddle with the cgi, see if it's as simple as I hope it is

Tarquin: ok, try http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/cgi-bin/imageupload.cgi/wiki-ext/imageupload_thumb.htt

EntropicLqd: Thanks m8. I'll give it a go when I get home (don't want to try it from here it might get the site blocked). I assume that fairly long filenames are OK - it means I can prefix the images with the tutorial they relate to.

Tarquin: I think a lot of the ones that have generic-sounding names aren't very good, eg "Texture Browser" includes the actor browser in shot (which is irrelevant), and is a jpeg (bad quality; use gif for simple colours). There's one somewhere I made of the surface flags which I hope is generic enough: I positioed the window so the button that opens it would be in-shot too .. (neat or wot?).

It seems we have a lot of dross:

What the hell is the Nikon pic? it was a camera , deleted
the spinning "email" logo? gah? it goes, IMO deleted
who is Picf0019 ? dunno, deleted

Mychaeel: I agree about the generic names (like "Fig_A"). Some images should be deleted too since they're Wiki-unrelated. Fortunately the image referrer check prevents that sort of abuse.

http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/images/icesig – forum signature image. deleted
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/images/Picf0019 – some private wedding picture. deleted (poor photographing skills btw. )

If you want to replace a poor JPEG-encoded user interface screenshot by a better GIF or PNG one, use the image uploader's "Replace image" functionality.

It seems we have a lot of dross:

loads of stuff that's too dark
too big
personal map screenshots: which ones are used in tutes, which ones are just "here's a map I made"?

And the "what the hell are these" bucket:

(bucket is empty )

Mychaeel: Delete 'em. And I'll add a note to the image uploader that remote linking isn't possible.

Mychaeel: Done.

Wormbo: Having the name of the user who uploaded (maybe also deleted) an image like on Recent Changes would be nice.

ZxAnPhOrIaN: Or a column in the image uploading area that says who uploaded the picture.

Mychaeel: That'd mean I'd have to keep track of that in an extra database file. Right now everything is saved in and by the file system. We do have the IPs/hostnames of the people that uploaded those files though.

ZxAnPhOrIaN: Ok

Wormbo: That's what I meant. Is there any reason why the pictures above shouldn't be deleted?

Tarquin: Nope. kill 'em!

Wormbo: Deleted the pics.

ZxAnPhOrIaN: Got rid of those red x's.

Mychaeel: The [image uploader] got some enhancements –

Image URLs now contain a secured expiration timestamp; they expire five minutes after having been generated. Linking to images in the wiki image database from anywhere outside the Unreal Wiki is ultimately futile since the links will be valid for no more than five minutes.
For each image, the image uploader displays the names of the Unreal Wiki pages the image is used on. Pages that are used nowhere are easy to spot (and ElMuerte and I spent some time removing them for now).

I'm also looking into a way to show image uploads on Recent Changes just like page edits.

MythOpus:Will linking within the wiki to images that are actually being used for the wiki purposes not allow the 5min expiration to affect the picture being linked too?

Mychaeel: The wiki image embedding markup (@block@imagename etc.) automatically generates the required timestamp when the page is rendered. Assuming a browser starts loading the images contained in a wiki page within five minutes of starting to load the page itself, all images will be displayed properly; but taking the image URL out of the rendered HTML will yield an address that'll expire shortly.

Tarquin: That sounds pretty neat!

Mychaeel: I hope it'll turn out useful :-) – I've now also added logging of image uploads and deletions on Recent Changes (you might have noticed). Known issue: Even for wikizens who are logged in, it'll only display the host address instead of the name. I'll look into that later.

Wormbo: It's not the host address of the user who modified the image, but the address of the user who views Recent Changes. BTW: I just reverted one and deleted two other images.

Graphik: Also, Mych, when I deleted a pic called NormaN (which was some stupid mug shot), it listed my host on RC not only as the one who deleted the image but also the uploader of the image. Do we (by "we" meaning the creator of the image and myself) concidentally have the same host, or is this a bug?

Wormbo: This is what I tried to say above. It's a bug.

Mychaeel: Bwaaah. What an idiotic bug. The IPs are logged correctly, they're just not displayed. I'll upload a fix later when BeyondUnreal has sorted out its FTP connectivity problems.

Mychaeel: Fixed it, and now it also displays the user name on Recent Changes.

El Muerte: Mychaeel, how do you identify deleted images in the rclog? I'm updating the mozilla sidebar code to cope with the new image rclog hack.

Foxpaw: Is there a way to revert images? The "changes" link on recent changes lists previous revisions, and lets you view them, but does not seem to provide an easy way to revert other than saving the image to your harddrive and uploading it again.

Mychaeel: I'd say that's the way to go to revert images. I could add extra functionality to allow users to directly revert to a previous revision, but I fear that doing so might open even more doors to easy abuse.

El Muerte: arg, ok, the "delete" feature in the changelog of an images doesn't delete the most recent image, but deletes them all. That wasn't very clear.

Mychaeel: Well, it does only delete the most recent image (the "Current Revision"). What it doesn't do – and what you expected, it seems – is undeleting the previous image revision. Thinking of it, I could probably add a feature which reverts an image to a certain revision by moving the most recent revision to the trash and undeleting the selected older revision.

Requests

EntropicLqd: The two images I need right now are the "static mesh browser" button, and the "add volume" button.

Tarquin: They're already in. See Add a volume and Static mesh browser

CH3Z: requested on Wiki Development Header: "Game Logo Smileys"

ut.png, ut2003.png, devastation.png and so on.

16x16- alpha-channelled- without an antialiased edge.

Tarquin: Um. I thought you said you'd do these? nm, I can do the UT & UT2003 ones at least. Mych? Any idea for filenames?

CH3Z: I was afraid I might have taken the discussion down prematurely. I said I would make them when they were going to be gifs. But I don't have experience with png's. Those are the file names Mych asked for with different extensions now. I see you figured out that the full discussion is in revision 184 of Wiki Development and I saw your notes. Gotcha, I'll get a better feel for this.

Tarquin: I'm doing: U1, UT, UT2003, Devastation.