Site Forum

There are a lot of new users to the site - that's awesome and welcome aboard! You'll find many useful tools to research and track your collection. It takes time to go through and discover, but all is well worth it.

I've noticed, however, a large amount of upload attempts to be photographed and not scanned. Please familiarize yourself with the FAQ sections regarding image uploads. Let's keep the site looking uniformly clean.

https://www.tcdb.com/FAQ.cfm?ITEM=ScanningCards

Thanks!

Thanks for posting this. I have also noticed a lot of photographed images. I have flagged several in the past few weeks as "Problem - Photographed" under the "Status" option in the Crop Help queue. However, it seems like they still get uploaded, user gets credit and the image just gets tagged for replacement.

If I recall, I thought selecting such a Status previously denied the image and alerted the uploader, but maybe I am wrong.

Just a couple of thoughts, being older I understand that a scanned image does produce a great image but give it a few years and when the user base gets younger none of them will own a scanner or maybe even a computer. I think that you are losing an opportunity to have even more images and even a better database then it already is,  I believe this to be one of the greatest trading card resources and it will only get better. Your issue is not with how the image is created but the quality of the image. With the high quality of some of the phones/cameras out there equally great images can be done with phones the problem is not with the device but with the laziness and unprofessional carefree attitude in which some people use the device. What about educating users the way you did  in your example here and slowly try the idea of letting users use their phones to submit images according to your strict guidelines. I know that I have wanted to submit images but only had my phone in which to do so and for that reason did not submit the image. If you use the proper software you could even use scan mode and take the few seconds to do it correctly you would not be able to tell by looking at it. Yes of course if you looked at the image data you would be able to identify the manner in which it was produced. Anyway some food for thought that is all. If and when I am back to my setup with a scanner I shall be submittig and contributing as best I can.

Bip

The photos are really bad. Phone shadows. People's hands in them. Cards leaning against walls or whatever is on the table at the time. They're terrible and shouldn't be allowed.

     Bip, I agree with you 100%. I haven't submitted a lot of my special edition cards because they aren't scanned. Most adults know the difference between a sh*tty picture and a good one. I would prefer to see a card that might have a reflection, or slight glare simply for identification purposes since there are an insane amount of variations/subsets. I don't know anyone who owns an actual scanner. There are some really nice scanner apps for smart phones that produce pictures that meet the site guidelines. 

To avoid too much back and forth the issue isn't the members it is the site rules. If you believe you have an app that works as well as a scanner try petitioning Admin. Posting opinions on the forum will not change anything as a search through forum postings will show you:) 

And don't most of our printers have scanners? I don't know why we think scanners are disappearing.

Even with scanners we have glare on some of the chrome or reflective cards.  But yeah, if someone's hand is in the pic that's bad.  I have seen pictures taken of cards in photo boxes that come out just as good if not better than scanned pictures but you need to be nearly profesional photo shoot level to get the pictures that good.  I doubt 99% of the people here with cell cameras would be able to get such a picture.

It is too bad though that you can't flag a picture as a temp pic if it's bad because even a bad picture is better than nothing.

Side note, I just looked and you can pick up a handheld scanned wand from Wall-Mart for around $50.

Thank you for the direction, I appreciate the solid advice to avoid me spinning my wheels I will approach admin. Most printers may indeed come with scanners I know the MFP's generally do its been close to 10 years since I was in the market for one and almost just as long since I had need of one in the home.Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction and saving me the man hours.

May you have luck in your collecting endeavours.

Regards

Bip

Why photos are not allowed.

Once these get on the site they are extremely difficult to get rid of and quite frankly are embarrassing to the site.

I think the big difference between a nice scan and a nice photograph is that invariably, the angle of the camera will create a distortion between the top of the card and the bottom of the card. When uploaded, the angle will create pronounced gaps in the image on the site.