BuddyPress.org

My thoughts on the group vs profile pictures, sorry if I get rambling too much.

First, if I upload a picture, I want to ensure that I am explicitly recognized as the owner of that picture (I’m assuming that people are only going to be uploading their own works). It shouldn’t matter where I upload that picture on the site, it should always have a link into my profile. Since we don’t want to duplicate pictures in the site and having multiple URLs that point to the same content is considered bad, why not just always have pictures in linked in the user’s profile album.

As for groups. Yes, being able to upload directly from the group page is a nice idea. The tagging system previously described by you guys should be used here for sure. I think Flickr sort of makes it hard on this aspect because you can tag photos but you can also put photos into a group. That seems like an extra step to me. Use the tags to represent the group. For example, if you have a group called “The Photogs”, just tag all pictures uploaded from that group page with “The Photogs” (of course, make sure the user is aware of this and allow them to remove the tag if desired, etc.). This would require two things – your tagging system sort of needs to know all of the groups on the system and it then also needs to ensure people aren’t tagging their pictures with a tag that is also a group name when they don’t mean to (‘Are you sure you want to tag this picture to belong to the group “The Photogs”‘). Of course, this could allow users to ‘uncover’ hidden groups but I’m not sure that’s a big deal.

Coming back to the first point, picture ownership. At some point you’re going to have to add some way for people to assign a license to their uploads. Most sites can get away with something in their terms of usage that is a blanket statement but some will have to allow their users full control over licensing of pictures. Creative Commons (like Flickr) is easiest.

The reason I mention this is we’re talking about mostly public pictures on public websites.

Public vs private is also a concern when allowing people to tag their pictures or upload them to a group. If a picture is uploaded to a public group, it can’t be set as a private picture. If the group is private, does the picture have to still be public? There might be some interesting combinations.

And now for something a little different – Privacy.

A user should always have full control of their pictures. A user should also be able to permanently remove their username if it is tagged against a picture (like Facebook person tagging). Users should be notified when they are tagged in pictures and it might also be better to require them to approve themselves being tagged in a picture before the tag is visible publicly. Users should only be able to tag people who they are friends with. Maybe people who are in the same groups, but definitely not any random user on the site.