Sandy, with you permission, i would like to submit edited pictures for twistypuzzles. i have a lot of pictures of items that i have taken from ebay,
i have edited them and was wondering if you would like them. Also if i see anything else that is not here would you like pictures of any and all different sticker variations. these are of course new items that i have not seen here yet. How many pictures do you still need editing?

Adam,

Unless you have permission from the sellers who actually had taken the pictures, I am not sure that publishing them on Twisty site is a good idea...

Sandy?

Aleksey.

Aleksey makes a good point, however, publishing a picture that someone else has taken probably wouldn't be a big deal, especially if you remove the background from the picture. The problem I see is when someone copies an Ebay picture to use in posting their own auctions. A couple of years ago I auctioned a 5x5x5 cube and took the picture of the cube on my carpet. A week later I saw an auction for the same item and the seller had used my picture without permission. It upset me somewhat, especially seeing that the seller made no mention that the puzzle being auctioned was not the same one that was pictured. I kindly emailed the seller, (who never replied back to me). Anyone else have thoughts on this??

I have personally collected over 1000 pictures from eBay over the years, all of which I eventually plan to sift through for possible addition to the site. I realize the following is a questionable statement, but none of the pictures I copied in this manner were marked with a copyright of any sort. Because of this, I feel confident in making the following assumpsions:

1) The seller is the actual owner of the photograph.
2) No financial harm could come to the seller since the photograph was shot exclusively for that auction, the auction is over, and the seller has no further use for the photograph.
3) No other possible harm could come to the seller since the background and any other potentially identifying information is removed from the photograph before posting it here. (A perfect example is images 9 and 10 of the Chex Cube entry.)

Whenever such a person realizes that their photograph has been copied here against their wishes, their first and only legal step would be to send me a request to remove their photograph from the site... which I would do without delay since it is never my intention to hurt anyone in my attempt to inform the field about an item.

To summarize, I don't see any real problem to using the photographs. Although, in hindsight, I wish I had kept track of the seller id for each auction photograph I copied since I would have liked to include their name in the Contributors list at the bottom of the item page. I will be sure to keep track of this information as I go forward.

Adam, if you would like to contribute eBay photographs to the site, please feel free. If you have the seller ID, please include that information with your contribution. If you're feeling truly ambitious, ask the seller for permission to use the photographs and (if desided) to include his/her name or eBay ID as the contributing photographer.

> Also if i see anything else that is not here would you like pictures of
> any and all different sticker variations. these are of course new items
> that i have not seen here yet.

As a general rule, please submit photographs of ANY twisty puzzle that you can't find here! The more the merrier.

> How many pictures do you still need editing?

I only have a few hundred left from the photography sessions I did last summer, but I have an entire cabinet of unphotographed new additions. I estimate that there are around 100 new items to be photographed which will result in another 400-500 pictures, maybe more.

When I'm sitting there looking at the mountain of work still to go, it sometimes feels like this process will never end. But then I look at the much larger mountain of work already accomplished. Our "continuous" effort over the past two years is definitely getting us there. I can't imagine what it will feel like to have truly processed every single photograph shot, collected or contributed for this site, but it will indeed happen. Sometime in 2005 there will come a time when the queue will be empty.

Sandy

Thank you for answering my questions so quickly. i assumed that alot of the pictures that you have gotten were from ebay. this "project" that i am trying to do is helping me learn Photoshop more. i hope i can help you out in getting you pictures that you dont have already and make your statement of "The web's most complete collection." more of a reality.

another question i now have is should i post each of the picture set individually or send you clumps of 10 pictures together. and should i wait till the auction is done or does it matter. as for the last picture of the banana cube, i edited it so much that you cant even tell that it is the same cube, i hope to have enough luck that people take a good picture of 3 sides so i can possibly do the same for other cubes.

> i assumed that alot of the pictures that you have gotten were from ebay.

Actually, I think only a few user contributions were from eBay. I have collected pictures of non-database puzzles from eBay as a way of finding photographs of puzzles that I don't have in my own collection and that other contributors haven't sent in. I have yet to start sifting through them to find out which puzzles among them are still missing from the database. I suspect there are only going to be a hundred or so out of the 1000 that are going to be a) still required and b) of decent enough quality to justify spending the time to add them.

> make your statement of "The web's most complete collection." more of a reality.

Depending on how one reads the word "more" in your sentence, it could sound like you might be suggesting that I haven't made a truthful statement! Hendrik's site is definitely up there, but I made sure and did an accurate count before I made such a bold statement. I just did a re-count, and it's still quite true, by a very sizable margin. Is there a larger one that I don't know about?!

> another question i now have is should i post each of the picture set individually

That would make things easiest on me. As before, please post the largest possible edited picture. If the picture is not large enough (as is likely to be the case for eBay pictures), then please don't stretch it or add white space to make it 350x350. My scripts assume the image has no white space added and generates the thumbnails first using the full-size image. Here's an example: Russian Pyraminx. Notice how the thumbnails have no white space, but the large version of the first picture actually has a bunch of white space. Before I ran the script, the original image was cropped right around the outside of the puzzle to make sure the thumbnail didn't have a bunch of white space in them.

> and should i wait till the auction is done or does it matter.

I think it's best to wait at least until the auction is over!

Sandy