I love all the pictures but it can take a long time to look at them all. I have been through them a couple times. Is there a way to search for specific pictures that I am missing? Maybe by name or plant type or species or whatever?
Have you tried the Search For Plant at the top of the PlantStew pages? You can search by common name or latin name.
Yah, I have done that but there are no pictures to go with the results. I think it would increase members ability to find specific plants more quickly if they had a picture reference and didn't have to click on each listing to see it.
When I do a plant search, I can see one photo next to the plant name if any photos are uploaded to the plant. Aren't those showing for you either, f4a?
Not for the ones I search for yet, lol. Must just be my luck. At least I know that the feature exists. Now we need to get everyone to submit their pics so we have one for every plant in the database.
Hi F4A, I hear you on this one and it's a feature I'm trying to streamline. The images that appear beside search results have to be prepared manually i.e. a image has to be chosen to represent the plant in search results and then I have to make the square image that will fit nicely beside search results. As you can imagine this takes time and it makes more sense to do it for the most popular plants first. The new feature added yesterday 'Gardens' will help in this respect as I can see which plants are popular and create the search images for those plants first. I will try to come up with a placeholder solution for this issue while images are being created. Adding it to the To Do list... // frank
Trust me, I know how much work it is to run a forum. I moderated an aquarium forum for 2 years and it was a ton of work just to do that. I am friends with one of the admins there and she works way too hard on the forum. Another suggestion, is there a way to maybe program the forum so that you can see thumbnails of a lot more than just 20 plants? This may help to make it easier to at least get close to what a person is looking for. Someone comes in with a plant question and can do a quick search and click on a plant that is close to what they have instead of thumbing through so many pages?
I could add the ability to view more than 20 plants at a time F4A on that particular page. The thing is that the page you linked to is not a search results page like the normal search. On the normal search you can search for a plant and if there are thumbnails available you can look at up to 100 images at the same time. This would be the same thing more or less. Does that make sense?
I think we are pretty much n the same page. http://www.gardenstew.com/plantstew/sea ... q=crassula That's the search I was talking about and I think that an image with each one would help a lot for new members trying to find a specific plant who only have a basic name or part of the scientific name. Is there any way to set it so that the first image for each shows up? Might not be the best idea though as we want the best representation for each plant. No worries here, just trying to share some ideas. Don't work too hard, I don't like it when the admin and/or mods get grumpy from lack of sleep.
We are on the same train of thought F4A I would love for there to be images beside each and every result and as members add them it will become reality. Droopy has submitted quite a lot of Hosta photos (thanks Droopy), have a look at what can be achieved when more images exist: http://www.gardenstew.com/plantstew/sea ... er_page=25 It's pretty powerful and I hope as time goes by we can get closer to that for many more searches. Your ideas are appreciated! Making things work better on the Stew never makes me grumpy
The first link you gave was to the pages that contain images of plants as they are uploaded by members, page 1 being the newest entries. That isn't really a place to search. The second link you gave goes to a plant page where no one has entered any information or uploaded pictures. Using the "Search for Plant" feature at the top of the PlantStew page will bring up entries whether you use the common name or the scientific name. Using the Advanced Search feature you can search by color of flower, vine, shrub, tree, annual, perennial, etc. So without knowing a specific name you could use that to probably find the plant.
