Welcome to the IPPVA Site Testbed – this site is still under development so that we can make ourselves ready without going public.
We have a number of priorities with the testbed:
We recently experienced a few issued with the video uploads on the competition – these have been repaired and a few quality-of-life upgrades added – the system no longer attempts to load the video until transcoding has been completed.
When there’s nobody from a county who matches a given area of practice the site currently produces no search results. We’re working on resolving how best to manage who to suggest in place of photographers from that county. One suggestion is to take all surrounding counties, which may work, however we may also allow users to specify areas they cover – the debate is ongoing. The nuclear option here is to allow users to specify the counties they cover for each main photographic service type (since they can vary so much) which is why you may see options relating to this appearing in future.
Until now, all user video hosting was off-site, which could come across as unprofessional. From now we’re using IPPVA’s Vimeo for Business account to ensure that viewers only see IPPVA-hosted content in proper HD and with a custom player and no ads – we do need videographers to upload some of their videos so we can sort out the best way to display these in your profiles, so if these aren’t displaying correctly after upload, don’t panic, we’re on it.
The awards galleries don’t have the name of the award ebmedded in the image yet, that’s a change coming over the next couple of weeks.
We’ve done our best to bring all your user data over to the new system, however it’s best that everyone checks out their information, especially that relating to their specialisations, as this has big impact on the search results.
There’s a new system in town, we’re currently synchronising your old and new subscriptions but we can promise that renewals will be a much smoother process from now on, once everyone has moved over.
There are no longer any arbitrary limits to the size, format, filename or aspect ratio of images that can be uploaded to a gallery – you just need to stay under 100mp and our hosting package would appreciate it if they were JPEG, not TIFF. The storage and tech behind the galleries (Amazon S3 storage and imagekit.io thumbnail generation ) make the image handling industrial-grade, and the new system dynamically creates what we need when it’s needed, so you do not have to fuss around before upload- just throw those images at us.
You can have multiple banner images and switch between them by favouriting them.
You can have multiple profile images and switch between them by favouriting them.
We would strongly encourage everyone to upload high-res, single images that are pure photos and to no longer upload company logos as profile images, banners images with text or banner images that are more than one image in a single composition. We’re working on making fancy banners and banner images that can be composites/slideshows, so users generating their own will complicate this process. To this end, we also ask that you refrain from adding logos, award logos, photographer names or any other watermarks to your images. We’re going to implement our own naming and watermarking and they would appear over the top of yours, spoiling things.
One of the major objectives here is to eventually have a pool of high-res images we can pull from to show off member work.
We’re thinking about a company logo field so that company logos can appear but for now, we want to see your faces in profile photos. Sorry!
HOWEVER. The new uploader is still a bit clunky, shows some diagnostic text in the page, it is currently not the most amazing thing in the world to navigate up and down and it may break on some of you if you use it in unexpected ways. However it’s going to improve rapidly as people make reports and observations and we find out more about how you use it.
The first thing you’ll notice about the galleries in your profile is that we are now listing your awarded images at the top of the galleries section, ordered by the highest scoring images first. For some of you that’ll produce an enormous gallery, so we’re capping that at your top-100 awards for now.
Favouriting an image doesn’t have too much supecial significance right now, but it will in future be used to choose which images appear as the thumbnails for galleries, if we’re ever listing just one image from the gallery.
If you run into a problem on the site, there’s a help button in the bottom-right corner of the page, this is always going to be the best way to get in touch as it will create a ticket in our system and allow you to attach a screenshot we’ll see immediately.
If you really need to, you can email ippva@infrablue.support but responses may take an extra few hours.