In My Artwork - which contains art the user has uploaded - what should the caption consist of? Currently on the table is:
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The purpose of the captions is to aid the user in selecting the desired image, by aiding in recall or providing details like date of upload - "Which hamburger photo do I want? The one I uploaded yesterday, not the one from a month ago" - and dimensions - "Which logo do I want? The 2x2 one, not the 5x5 one."
Concerns have been raised about including filenames in the captions. How useful will filenames really be? (If users don't give meaningful names or the names aren't searchable.) What happens if users upload different files with the same name?
- The captions for user-uploaded art in Vistaprint and Zazzle consist solely of filenames. Moo's consist of filenames and dimensions (in pixels).
- All three allow more than one file with the same name; they don't append anything either (like numbers logo.png (1); logo.png (2)). It doesn't seem to be a problem (except for the user not having meaningful names to differentiate files).
- User-uploaded art in Zazzle is searchable by text strings within file names. It's also sortable (by date and alphabetically, by file name), and can be filtered by type of file. Can we add alpha/date sorting, and file name text searches, if not in this release, then a future one?
- Perhaps users will be conditioned to give more meaningful file names once they see the benefits of doing so (or problems stemming from not doing so) - especially if we offer search or sort functionality. Can we give users the ability to rename the files, by typing over the file name or some other means? This would allow them to recover from having uploaded files with poorly-chosen names. (I would not allow the extension to be edited.)
- Vistaprint does not offer searching or sorting of user-uploaded art, but it does offer additional tools for organizing images, such as folders. When art is uploaded via its designer, behind the scenes,in its "My Art and Logos" feature, art is automatically placed into folders by date. But folders can renamed and reorganized.
- We could add other functionality to enhance searchability, like keyword tags, but honestly, are our users going to go to that trouble? (We have enough difficulty getting them to tag products...) At least at this stage, it feels like an over-engineered solution for our audience.
Filenames may not be perfect, but they seem better than nothing.
Other observations
- Vistaprint, Zazzle and Moo allow the user to delete art. Vistaprint keeps track of what designs the art has been used on, and prompts the user with a warning.
- Vistaprint and Zazzle both have popups for viewing detail about the art and managing it. Zazzle's popup enables the user to rename art and add a description.
