Upload Mineral Photograph

From Mindat

To add a new mineral photograph, you must be registered and logged on to the system. The easiest way to add a photrograph is via the Add Photograph button on a locality page or the detailed mineral page (using the i icon after the mineral on a locality page). Another method is from the navigation header you can click on the "Add/Edit Data" button to begin the process of adding a photograph. This will then bring up the Add/Edit Menu.. On this page you click on the "Add a new photo (http://www.mindat.org/addpic.php)" Button.

Adding a mineral photograph is a two step process. First you upload the mineral photograph file. The next entry page is for location, mineral, copyright and scale/miscellaneous information. Programs on the mindat.org server will automatically generate thumbnail pictures and photographs resized for display in the various galleries.

Table of contents

1 Stage 1 2 Stage 2 3 Stage 3 4 Stage 4 5 Approval Process

Stage 1

If you mouse click on the "Browse" button, you can browse your computer's hard drive. Move to the file that you want to upload, and click on that file. When the filename appears in the field left of the "Browse" button. Click on the "Upload" button to upload your mineral photograph file to the MINDAT server.

Possible error messages:

1. Sorry - Your photo is likely a duplicate of this photograph. If these are not the same photo, either reprocess the photo with a slightly different jpg quality or do a minor crop of photograph.
2. Sorry - Your photo is not a valid JPEG file

Stage 2

The most prominent (or the mineral that you are trying to illustrate) should go on the first line.
Additional associated minerals should be filled in the following fields.

The next field is for locality information. You can enter just a portion of the locality string here, but if you type in a partial locality where there are too many possible locations, the program will not accept this. For the example on Stage 3 below, Arrens was used in this field.




The copyright holders name should go next (most probably your name) and a shortened version that will be displayed on thumbnails of your photographs.
The next field is a full URL (ie. http://mindat.org/) for your website if you want to include this.


A scale of the photograph is then entered (preferably in metric units, mm or cm). You can use the width of the photograph (ie. horizontal field of view is 5mm; or horizontal fov 5mm) or largest crystal is 3.0cm high. Coins are probably not a good size guide since most people would probably not know what is the size of a particular coin. If there are a number of minerals on the photograph, you to tell which crystal is which mineral (ie. green mineral is malachite, red is cuprite) since many site users would not be able to differentiate between minerals. You can also differentiate them by habit or a statement such as calcite on quartz. You should also include other information such as habit or pseudomorphism if these are applicable.

Stage 3

On the final page of the form, you need to click on the circle to the left of the proper location and then click the "Finish" button.

Stage 4

On this stage, you could link to mineral page and watch if all is right.

Remember when adding more than one photograph of the same specimen:

a) add the first specimen as you did before

b) at the end of the process click the thumbnail to open the photo page

c) click the "add another photo of this specimen" button

d) upload 2nd photo as normal

e) your details (eg minerals, location) are filled in for you - please write a new description!

Keep going until you've uploaded them all. Note you won't necessarily see the linking working until the photos have been approved.

Approval Process

Photographs will go through an approval process so they may not immediately be added to your gallery. Multiple examples of the same or similar samples are likely to be deleted (please pick the best photograph that you want to include).

For everyone who uploads photos you may now get an automatic email from the editorial team if we feel there are any problems with your photo.

The email will list which areas of concern we have about the photo, these can be items such as:

• "Your photo is too small"
• "Your photo is too large"
• "Your photo is not clear/out of focus"
• "Your photo does not adequately display the mineral(s) in question"
• "Your photo shows compression artifacts, is too highly compressed"
• "Your photo has an ugly background"
• "Your photo might not be the minerals you said it is"
• "Your photo might not be from the location you said it is"
• "The location you have specified is not accurate enough"
• "You have not specified a size or a scale for the photo"
• "The description is inadequate"
• "Your photo has been miscategorized"
• "You have not identified which part of the photograph shows the mineral(s) in question"
• "Your photo is too similar to another photograph of this specimen"
• "Your photo is not unique or distinct enough compared to other photographs of specimens from this location"

It is entirely down to the judgement of the editor approving your photograph to decide whether your photo fails in any of these ways, and whether this justifies blocking approval of the photo.

In some cases, such as missing description, you can edit this information yourself and let us know so we can re-evaluate your photo, in other cases you may need to delete the photograph and re-upload it.

We are happy to try to help in any way if you feel you want to contribute but you can't quite get your photos good enough to be of an acceptable quality (actually, I feel that my own personal photographs on the whole are pretty poor, and I intend to remove and reshoot a lot of them).

In all cases, if we have no response back from you, or if we feel that it is necessary for the sake of accuracy, we may in some cases delete photographs or edit descriptions/mineral names/localities ourselves to give a more accurate description.

We will, over time, be going through all photos previously posted to the site, and we will be raising such issues with you directly if we feel your photos need improvement.

Thank you for your support, and please don't take these reports as (too serious) criticism, we want to help everyone show their collection to the best.