---

I agree with Nikita that the quality of any gallery is dependent on the quality of people and the amount of work they are willing to put into constructing it.

I also recognize that there are many galleries particularly for Diptera that are extremely inaccurate. However this has nothing to do with the size of the gallery, there are large and accurate galleries and small and inaccurate ones as well.

I am also not saying that the way I am constructing my gallery is the best method for diptera.info. I upload the undetermined images to the family or subfamily albums, so any album is a mixture of undetermined, partially determined or determined images, hopefully there are very few misidentifications. I think misidentifications are part of the game, in every large collection there is a certain part of misidentified material. This is acceptable as long as the percentage is low. But I have many photos and few people to leave comments. Here there would be many people who would comment.

Paul obviously does not know every family sufficiently to be a master regulator. What he does, is that he follows the forums and will let an image go into the gallery if he thinks based on the forum that it is correctly identified or identified by an expert. This is not a foolproof method.

Yet my critcicsm was not addressing this issue at all.

Let me tell how I organize my gallery. My gallery consists of two parts. One that is accessible for me only as the administrator, and another part "Upload your images to this album", which is accessible for every user. Users can upload images to this accessible folder, but they can only be moved by administrator privileges to the contolled part. This means that my gallery can not be destroyed by others.

So the working model for diptera.info would be the following.

There should be a quality controlled album for diptera built in a similar system to what you can see here or on my web site. There could be other types of albums as well, not just taxonomic albums, but ones that depict certain behavior, or one that depict abnormal fiies or fly predators etc. Or an album with extremely common diptera.

And there would be a non-quality controlled part for posting images by users. The administrators would have the privileges to move any image from the non-controlled part to the controlled part. Any users could browse the freshly uploaded images and comment them, just like when you comment here on the forum.

Experts would be assigned to be responsible for maintaining the controlled part. Any of us could take responsibility for maintaining a family album or a few. Bad images or superfluous images would be deleted by the administrators. This is rather easy in gallery2, because almost everything one can do en masse. I think the administration of gallery2 is extremely easy to master.

This system would ensure that all images posted here would go to the gallery and that only those images would get to the controlled part that the community thinks interesting.

For my gallery I have the following rules: At most 8 images per one type of animal. Higher quality images have priority. Photos in natural settings have higher priority. Multiple views have priority.