Photo Rotating, and making Wikitree more user friendly. [closed]

Question

Why, in this day and age, can we not have an option to rotate photos. The question was asked 3 years ago. I understand that every option is another element of difficulty in the system, but the system needs to become more user friendly, to be more attractive to new users. How many times I have seen people sign up, but give up, struggling just to put their own family in, and I'm not a greeter.

www.wikitree.com/g2g/324354/rotating-a-photo?show=324354#q324354

What other suggestions can we come up with to make Wikitree more user friendly? It appears to be aimed at computer programmers. Don't get me wrong, Wikitree is great, but it needs to be more user friendly. My first suggestion, is make it possible to easily rotate photos.

Thank you for your time. I do love Wikitree, but have found over and over, that other people struggle with it.

Answer 1

I believe a conscious decision was made back in the beginning that the site was not intended to become a photo repository, and no photo editing software was included.  Some of us have been asking for years just to have the ability to change the display order of photos on a profile, but not even that one has gained any traction.  I realize that it could become one of those sinkholes for a developer -- i.e., I want to rearrange, you want to rotate.  Soon someone else will want to crop and resize, and then remove red eye and adjust colors, and then sharpen and clone and heal, and then ... on and on.

Comments

I just scrolled on down the page and stumbled onto the other thread on this subject.  As other members have pointed out, there is a lot of free photo editing software out there that can do whatever you want.

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Point taken. It would be inclined to get larger and larger. Conversely, because the photos are then stored permanently in the system, perhaps it does need some level of something, because inevitably, you will end up with many photos that should have been fixed, and weren't

Answer 2

I find it easier to rotate, crop and adjust size on my home computer before trying to upload. Maybe the instructions on uploading might need to be put into user friendly language.

Comments

I tried to reorient the last photo I put in, but then it didn't work. On the previous thread, I think someone pointed out that you have to find the right software, because not all of them will actually rotate the picture. Some just rotate the way you are looking at it, but keep it saved in the original position.

Answer 3

I think it all comes down to a matter of prioritising which changes to make with very limited resources. There are a lot of things that would be nice to have, with the ability to rotate photos being one of them. However there are also other things that cause greater problems and these will naturally tend to be fixed first. Sometimes something that is low priority but easy to do will get done quickly, but even then it is not just the time to make the change that matters but also the extra time to test it and make sure it doesn't break something else.

Different people will obviously have different ideas about which things are most important and should be tackled first. This is why when a new feature is announced you will often see a reply along the lines of "That's all very nice, but what about ... which is still broken?"

To get an idea of the many things that are being worked on, awaiting work to start or have been suggested, you can see the WikiTree To-Do list at https://trello.com/b/xTDiSnSW/wikitree-bugs-improvements

Comments

Certainly that is all true. I have seen great improvements even in the 2 years I have been here.