Congratulations on nearly 9 years of successful operation. However, the dynamics and interests of citizen volunteers has evolved and grown less over the years. I would like to submit a few suggestions:
1. Given the very small pool of volunteers, I think the Image Entries pick list should be swapped out much sooner, say after 2 weeks. Even if only one person has submitted a proposed finding, keeping images in the pick list for a month or more just hoping for more responses just means alot of other images are never going to be found.
2. I am not sure that the points system is all that useful anymore. It *is* however nice to know that others are actively volunteering. Maybe just a "quantity submitted" each week is all that is needed. No one is "competing" for high scores anymore (if ever).
3. As you know, most of the photos are in "sets" at the same relative location. We could easily geo-locate those 5 to 10 additional nearby photos so a much larger set of photos in the library are marked as "Cataloged with Center Point". As was your very first feedback on 23 July 2013, let us choose additional photos to geo-locate or at least attempt to geo-locate those +/- 10 before and after the photo in the pick list in filename order.
4. I use custom-made web tools that show me an entire series of photos before and after the "picked" image in your list, Google Earth for easy general geo-locating, and frequently use the existing "Search Photos" capability with ranged LAT/LON from the sub-orbital point. But most volunteers are just not aware how much easier those tools can make the task of geo-locating an image. Mention and recommend the use of Google Earth in your tutorial and FAQs. Also adding two new buttons on the primary Image Detection geo-locating page would vastly help volunteers: "Show Search Results" and "Show Addtl Images".
The "Show Search Results" would launch your existing "Search Photos" capability's results using "widened" Lat/Lon from the sub-orbital points with just "Include Cataloged with Center Point" checked (plus Daytime & Nighttime Images, plus all ISS missions selected). The "Show Addtl Images" would show +/- 10 images before and after the picked image's filename. Many times there are "context photos" before or after the images in your pick list that are far easier to geo-locate and lead directly to the image on the pick list. Do please provide the ability to click on a photo and bring up a *full-sized* copy of the image in a separate browser window is essential.
5. Much like the "Cities at Night" project, if the Image Detectives system had an additional "task" allowing volunteers to review and agree/disagree with submitted findings would help YOUR review process significantly, and let volunteers that may get frustrated with geo-locating images to still help by reviewing proposed submitted findings.
6. It likely would also help your internal review process (or that of #5 above) if the main Image Detective screen had a blank text field allowing volunteers to document just HOW a particularly difficult image was found. Many times I find a very difficult image by tracing through 10 sometimes 20 prior or next images. Just being able to supply you'all with the prior image or images that lead me to your picked image would help reviewers significantly in confirming a difficult-to-find geo-location since they could also "trace that path".
Again congratulation for a long-term citizen volunteer project, and thanks for any consideration of these suggestions.
I've been a volunteer working on the CitiesAtNight.org project, and have personally identified and geo-referenced over 400 of the NASA images thus far, and I know from their database that there are between 1,000 and 2,000 NASA images that are potentially geo-located. I have two questions:
1. Does the staff at NASA working on the NASA Image Gateway project and the Image Detective planning on pulling and incorporating the information that CitiesAtNight has vetted and will be vetting as the work progresses? It would seem an invaluable resource that would greatly amplify the Image Detective work.
2. If the NASA staff had not planned to gather and incorporate those identifications from CitiesAtNight, then rather than just having the small limited pool of pick-a-photo the current Image Detective offers, can an Image Detective "bug" be added to every NASA Image Gateway page, such that an Image Detective can click that bug/web link, and have that image loaded into the Image Detective application? It would be just a small extra step on my and other volunteers part to call up and post the identification into the Image Detective app in addition to doing it in the CitiesAtNight app. It seems so unnecessarily limited to only offer 96 images to choose from at a time in the Image Detective app, given the 100,000s of images available. I personally geolocate between 10 and 20 NASA images per day just in my spare time on CitiesAtNight.
A growing quantity of accurate identifications are being made for the NASA images, and it seems a tremendous loss for NASA to not tap what has already been identified. I personally do not care about points and top-scores and the like; I just want the identifications already made and continually being made to be as widely available as possible in NASA's own database.
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