PhotoShare Woes And How To Solve It

A spate of criticisms circulated the PhotoShare early this month. It seems that there is a clash in opinions regarding what and how the PhotoShare should be like. Raja Muhammad Jibrail had openly expressed his contempt towards photo spammers and felt that the photos uploaded by the culprits were vapid, thus bringing down the quality of the PhotoShare itself.

Jibrail was not the first to openly criticize photo spamming; fellow TPJCian, Shawn Wee, started a thread in late April to tackle the problem of 'photo-whoring'. His introductory statement include, "Nobody wants to see such nonsense. PhotoShare is not a place to dump all the crap you took. You wanna show your friends a whole bunch of subjectless photos? There's always Photobucket, Flicker, and even Friendster!"

Most forum regulars are behind Shawn, but some are still sceptical if the idea of photo spamming really exist in PhotoShare. The purpose of having the PhotoShare is to share photos with your schoolmates. There are no rules regarding what kind of photo you can upload. Pictures of CCA events, your favourite sports stars and even nature are occasionally uploaded in PhotoShare. Some users tend to share a bulk of photos which can cover at least two to three pages in the photo sharing system at one go. Each student is allowed up to 5000 photo uploads.

Nonetheless, veteran PhotoShare users such as Jibrail and even Ami Yousoff do not condone such actions, lamenting that PhotoShare is not what it was used to be. My personal favourite artist, Muhammad Noor Iskandar, jumped on the bandwagon to fight photo spamming. He wrote, "Haha true. Sometimes the flooding of photos are very very annoying here. Ehhe sometimes I have to remove my picture and repost them at a later time when this spammers post their photos."

Ami, on the other hand, appeared wretched that his photo did not made it to the Hottest List, allegedly due to photo spamming by another user. However, the photo finally made it in the Hottest List with 375 views and counting after a second attempt. This was the photo:

In my opinion, I believe labelling users who shared their 'uninteresting' photos in PhotoShare as photo spammers is not justified. From what I observe, it is just merely a difference in opinion from the two parties regarding what and how PhotoShare should be. In my opinion, there is no such thing as an irrelevant photo in PhotoShare, thus proving unequivocally that the term spammer is not valid. Obviously, the so-called photo spammers are all about their rights to share as many photos as possible in PhotoShare. And they have all the right to do so since PhotoShare does not specifically set rules which highlights that only original and humorous photos can be uploaded. Furthermore, humour itself is a subjective viewpoint - what you perceive as funny may be dull or even insulting to another.

On the other side of the table, another group of TPJCians suggests that a sudden upload of more than fifty pictures by a photo spammer will mean that other students are unable to view their very own photos. Critics are fast at attacking this group of people, stating that they are selfish and only want to get their photos in the Hottest List, thus stating photo spamming as an excuse when some of their photos failed to make it. I disagree with the critics. All this group of TPJCians want to do is to entertain us with their photos. They have taken time to produce their original pictures or searching for hilarious photos to be shared with the other students, and thus their photos deserve to be rewarded in the Hottest List.

So is there a solution for this? Yes, definitely. I suggest a category/tag selection system which allows users to choose which photos they wish to see. Students will also have choose a category for their photos upon uploading. Let this picture do the explaining:



From here, photos will be ranked in each category. However, there will also be a page which shows the list of photos that are top in all categories. It should look something like this:



It is important that we retain the objective to why PhotoShare was set up, that is to allow students to share their photos freely. I hope the solution above will bring about a win-win situation to both parties involved in the debate.