Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Photos of Community Interiors

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On Dec 13, 2014, at 12:19 PM, R Philip Dowds <rpdowds [at] comcast.net> wrote:

> As an architect and photographer, I have the conventional capabilities you 
> would expect of such a person.  I'd be interested in helping to accumulate, 
> process and store cohousing graphics in kind of a database format:  some sort 
> of standardized approach to site plan / common house plan / and typical 
> dwelling units, keyed to photos showing what things look like, really.  I 
> could receive, process, tag and upload graphic files -- but I'm not sure that 
> Picasa (or Zenfolio, the one I use) is really the right place.  Maybe the 
> National website is a better choice.

Fabulous. Having seen Philip's work at Cornerstone on organizing photographs, I 
whole heartedly support him in taking the lead on this.

I have reservations about using a public forum. Because of a single decision by 
Yahoo, all our early message  attachments were deleted with no way for us to 
retrieve them. Several years worth of documents. Some have been reconstructed 
based on memories but the historical development is lost. The last time I 
checked Google Sites had the same capability. They own material posted on their 
sites and except for always changing privacy agreements, can do as they please 
with materials, including deleting them. 

Perhaps not a huge risk if we also keep copies in an archive. But that 
duplicates work since the captions are not usually added to the photographic 
file.

I think there are possibilities for providing the same services on the 
Cohousing.org site.

Also, I use Wordpress for our photos and archives. It now has the ability to 
post documents by email. Our secretary emails minutes to the website. The 
subject line becomes the title of the post. I then tag the minutes and check 
formatting. Unless she has used some odd settings in Word, they come through 
with all the formatting intact. It is really amazing. Of course I have 10 years 
of documents still to load but this will make it much easier.

I don't know if photos can be submitted the same way but I suspect they can. 
There are bulk up-loaders for sure. Drupal, which Catya uses for the 
Cohousing.org site must have the same capability.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org