As you may have noticed, over the past few weeks I’ve been quietly waging a campaign to make a drastic step-up in the quality of grabs in heavy rotation here. This doesn’t mean that every last building, keogh, landscape, industrial whosicallit, and virtually identical to the last one grab has been removed. It just means there are a lot fewer of them, and your odds of getting something more inspiring by refreshing the image a few times are a lot higher.

To explain the upgrade in more detail, a ramble is needed on how the images work at IS and the change in philosophy behind the recent changes. As you may know, I load up directories with images from various sources, ephemeral films in one, feature films and the like (the so called IS Playhouse section) in another, still photos in another, and depending on what part of the day it is, when somebody asks for a new image, they’re dealt one out from the appropriate directory, provided it’s been at least 30 seconds since the last image was dealt.

Most of the time, we’re running screengrabs from ephemeral films courtesy of the Prelinger Archive. When IS first started around five years ago, all of the images came from about 1250 of these films, and the grabs had been automatically generated by archive.org. Some time after that archive.org made a few hundred more prelingers (with lower quality grabs) and a few score from the A/V Geeks archive available. All those images have made up the core of the heavy rotation ever since.

Early on, my philosophy was to try and simulate a grade-Z TV station showing these films and grabbing images at an arbitrary interval much as Caption This! had from their grade-Z station. I had a stack of reasons for leaving the lousy images in: Not every grab could be a winner. This was the advanced class for people who’d graduated from CT! I didn’t want to stamp my editorial style on every last image. The tough images produce some ingenious responses. You can’t please all of the people all of the time. If you knew exactly what was happening in the image, that would defeat the purpose. If I took out the cruddy images, the good ones would just cycle through that much faster. Changing now would just be giving in to the whiners.

But, time has passed, and a lot of these arguments don’t seem as compelling as they used to. There’s no longer a CT! to go to instead. Those original images have been shown many many times. Truth be told, sometimes there were long stretches with no good image. For a long while I’ve been slowly upgrading the grabs film by film, downloading the movie and handpicking the best grabs. Here’s a little before and after from one such update:

Before: After:

This is maybe not the best example, because the old images were more monotonous than they are awful, but we’ve gone from 35 images of mixed cap-ability to 75 images of mostly reasonable cap-ability and reasonable variation. (Note, the images have been scaled down, so some of the text may not be as legible as it will on IS). But, the point is that by updating films in this way, I’ve been able to remove the chaff directly for about 20% of the original collection, all of the AV/Geeks films, and a healthy chunk of the second wave of Prelingers, and at the same time grow the number of images in rotation. But it was still going to take forever to remove all the junk. So I finally decided to go a spree and add enough new images that I could take out the bottom 15% of grabs for the remaining films without speeding up the rotation. In the process, I even found a few films that had somehow entirely escaped IS before, and have ended up removing around 2,000 lousy images and adding about the same number of not so lousy images.

As always, no applause, only money.

p.s. This article’s title is misleading, there’s still around the same number of grabs about food as before, but I had to go with the reference to the album that’s supplied a lot of little elements for my sites.

This entry was posted by GersonK on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 12:31 am and is filed under Caption Sites, Inventing Situations, movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.