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I hope to have the E-Type calendar available sometime next week (maybe by December 10). I’m not sure, exactly, which other calendars might make it into production this year. I can probably find enough XK photos, but I’ll have to wait and see what I find for the others.

It seems every other day I get an email from an owner asking that photos be deleted. This site was not set up to service owners; it was meant to track the history of individual cars over time…but I swear half the email I accumulate about the sites is “please delete everything about my car except what I want.”

To be clear, we will never delete photos you did not personally take. And when you upload photos, if you read the terms (does anyone?) we say up front we will not delete images you upload unless they’re duplicates or have some other problem, like a lack of model releases.

So tiring.

We deleted about 2000 duplicate images from the sites in the past few days, and the work is now complete. We’re also fingerprinting new images going forward, so hopefully this won’t be a problem again. Interestingly, we also turned up about a dozen duplicate cars in the process which had been missed before, and they’ve been deleted as well. So overall, the data has improved considerably. Many thanks (once again) to Paul for his help.

We have some software churning away in the background which is “fingerprinting” every image on the various data sites. This allows us to automatically identify duplicate images. I’m not actually removing any until it’s done so I can see how many there were, but so far the duplicate rate is roughly 1.5%. Extrapolated out, and assuming it holds true, that means roughly 1,000 images across the various sites are duplicates.

Change is always met with resistance, but I updated the front page to have a full-screen slideshow. Because the images are saved much smaller than most modern screens, they may appear a bit blurry, however, the “atmosphere” is nice and makes the front page a lot less crowded.

Just FYI, the slideshow images are pulled from “exterior” and “action” shots, and even then, they’re only chosen if they’re near the site’s maximum allowed size to keep the blurriness from being even worse than it is. I looked at 10,000 XK exterior images this evening to reclassify errant images and remove duplicates as I saw them. I hope to do the same for the other sites over time but the 40,000+ exterior images in the E-Type site is a daunting challenge!

If you have any trouble with it, drop me a line.

Paul and I are just in the final stages of testing a new photo uploader.

The good news is it should handle large(ish) images fairly gracefully, offers the ability to select any number of images from a single dialog box, shows progress bars for each image as they upload, and the “fill in a caption” screen is cleaner, easier to use, and allows accidentally uploaded images to be deleted before saving.

The flip-side is that it uses a very small flash-based plugin to allow some of these things to happen (mainly the progress bars, multi-file selection, and better handling of large file uploads). This will be meaningless to most of you, but it does mean the nifty new tool won’t work from any device Steve Jobs has determined shouldn’t have flash (ie, your iPhone).

Anyway, I think you’ll agree it’s an improvement…once it goes live, if you encounter any problems drop me a line.

I was 150 messages in arrears, some dating back to April. The shame. However, you lot are pretty well used to it by now, I would expect.

If you’ve written me about a site issue or other inquiry in the past three (!) months, I hope to get to your query in the next week or so. I let correspondence accumulate until the weight of it starts an avalanche and I’m about to be buried–sorry about that!

If you use firefox, there are three “personas” I’ve created which you might enjoy using. One for xkedata, one for xkdata, and one for coventry racers. (The new Firefox 4 layout has the XKE persona looking a bit busy, I might edit it or add a new one.)

You can find them here: Carcrux personas. Enjoy!