A question from someone who does occasionally post BW pictures. Should there be a separate B&W gallery? The reason for asking is that it seems that B&W pictures receive unfairly low C-Indexes for the quality of work. I realise that B&W is not to everyones taste.

I apologize if this question has been discussed before, I do not have time to trawl 60 page of posts.

I do believe I started a thread asking the same thing like ... 2 years ago. The idea was shot down as the subcategories would overlap too much.

I still think a B&W gallery would be appropriate even with the overlap.

Link for noahnott's thread

Reading my comments seem very very ... awkward. My comments are even awkwarder.

I dont think it should have subcategories as there are not enough people offering pictures. So just a B&W gallery under photography would be nice.

the initially muted idea of a mono filter on peoples search seems like a much more feasible solution.

Yay; its a good idea (from where I stand).

A filter would certainly work, but as the poor relation in Caedes, poor C-indexes will keep them from being viewed by general browsing public, whereas a specific gallery might be more positive in promoting them. That said a filter would at least help, if not solve the poor CI issue.

Currently photography is sorted by subject rather than by style/medium. That's why B&W as a category doesn't really work, as it would mean photographs which were previously easy to locate by subject would all be mixed up together in a single gallery.

from the first 100 pages of photographs (1,200) there are 20 BW pictures (1.5%). Finding BW pictures is very hard in itself. Even if lumped together, there would only be 10 pages or so in the whole BW gallery, hardly difficult for someone to flick though if the wanted a specific subject. However, I can see I am hitting my head against a brick wall, so I shall wait for a filter and in the mean time try to wade through 800+ pages of other pictures.

Having a B&W gallery won't affect the c-index of our B&W photos, because the same voters will be voting on them, as before. To make it work the B&W photos would have to only be voted on by people who like black and white. Even that wouldn't work, because then they'd tend to give B&W images inaccurately high scores.

Unfortunately for better or for worse people here on Caedes in general prefer color (preferably red or orange) photos to monochrome.

Well having their own gallery would make some difference, since in the B&W gallery the B&W pictures would not all be at the bottom end of the C-Index, and hidden behind many coloured Pictures. i agree their c-index would still be low, but the relative CI would be high.

It is simple...present a picture because you just want to share what you saw. The viewer either likes it, or they don't...

Rick, the point is that most voters in Caedes seem biased against B&W, this puts the pictures at a disadvantage when they get to the main gallery because their CI is low. A separate gallery would give good B&W pictures a better chance of being found and seen.

I think Regmar said it all. I agree BW is not for everyone Chris, but so what. While it is nice to see a high score, at the end of the day it means nothing. I personally place way more value on an honest comment/critique from a viewer than the vagrancies of the index.

I'm going to point out the obvious here. The c-index is meaningless. The voters represent a small group of site participants, and the site participants represent a skewed sample of art aficionados. Stuff that I sell right off my cubical wall - stuff that people rave about and hang on their walls in their homes - here gets a passing wave. C-Index of 50. Hell even the algorithm that "calculates" c-index weights people's votes based on their previous voting patterns :-(

Don't use the c-index as your sort criterion, and then you won't have the issue of the B&W stuff disappearing. I sort by date generally, so I don't even notice the c-index except when I'm feeling particularly bitter.

The good news though is that we don't use c-index in any way when we search out and select images to go into the permanent galleries.

I appreciate that C-Index is not used to select works for the permanent galleries, but people accessing the site may well sort using it, and that puts B&W, and indeed other not so mainstream works, at a disadvantage.

Well, that is a good point. It's one that I used to espouse as well (and sometimes still do). I suppose I've become a bit jaded, because I don't really care much whether people as a mass love my work. I've given up hope of being the next Ansel Adams, and am content to be the best Regmar I can be :)

Fixing the C-Index has been the task we've attempted for the entire life of the site. The problem really is that people don't vote honestly, and they tend to only pay attention to art they like. This means that less mainstream art gets ignored. The current system is the best we've been able to come up with after juggling many ideas that have been suggested through the life of Caedes. Unfortunately it's nowhere close to perfect, and we know it.

The idea of having people join groups, then having voting take place inside the groups was discussed in the past, and what we decided was that you'd get galleries full of unnaturally high scores, because the people voting on the images would already like them. We'd be right back where we were two years ago with galleries full of 100's.

I do feel your pain, and I agree that fixing the c-index would be a good thing, but how?

How about not having C Index on the main galleries. To get there the picture has to be good, like in the RA summer exhibition. However, once selected, exactly how good should not matter. Have date searches, or random, but not C-Index - which by your own admision is flawed.