Railway Herald Photographic Competition

Cameras at the ready! We have a fantastic photographic competition for you - win one of six Lowepro DSLR Camera Bags! Purposely designed for DSLR cameras and multiple lenses, the bag includes a built in rain jacket, waist belt and tripod clip, together with a dedicated laptop pocket.

Details are in the latest edition of the magazine - and if you're looking for inspiration, Andrew has lots of advice for getting the best results from your photographs in his column: Improve your Railway Photography


Download the latest issue here: Railway Herald :: Magazine :: Preview Issue

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Railway Herald :: Magazine :: New Subscriber Offer

 

While this photographic competition is to be welcomed, I wonder if it will result in an improvement of the image review process that RH employs.
I have noticed rather too often that the speed (and order) in which images for display on the website progress from first upload to actually becoming available for others to view is somewhat variable, to say the least. My own (worst) record to date is eight days; six and seven day waits have not been unusual. That is actually quite quick as the review process for images submitted for publication in the magazine via the website (and now by implication, entered into this new competition) is apparently much slower. I have had images stuck in the 'awaiting review' queue for weeks with no indication as to whether or not anyone has bothered to look at them.
It is also uncommon for all of the images uploaded more or less simultaneously as a batch to be moderated together. More often than not, two or three will get through fairly quickly (within 24 hours) and the rest will get moderated over a period of several more days. Has anyone else noticed this?
There is absolutely no indication that the RH moderators know what a queue is, let alone how to manage one. The order in which images get moderated is entirely arbitrary and it is especially galling on occasions when I see images appearing on the website that were obviously not even taken when mine were first submitted to the queue in which they are still awaiting moderation.
While I appeciate that the weekly magazine is produced to tight deadlines, as a subscriber to RH magazine, I regard the website as part of the service that I'm paying for - and I don't believe that it is unreasonable of me to expect RH to provide a speedy (24 hours would be reasonable), impartial (No queue jumping!!) and consistent process by which they moderate the images (After all, that's something that they insist on doing.) that I and others upload.
Cheers,

 

Hi Mick,

Thanks for your response - sorry it's taken a couple of days - I don't deal with the Image Gallery and so I wanted to get a response from the Editor before I posted a reply.

We receive a large number of images every day - sometimes 100s - and these are viewed by a team of volunteer moderators who give up their free time to assess images. Volunteers review and process images on a daily basis. Images are moderated in a random order so that it reduces the change of multiple moderators seeing the same image (this may be the reason you have experienced some images being passed through faster than others submitted at the same time), and all images are assessed anonymously so that impartiality is ensured.

So, sorry you've experienced delays with the submission process - and thank you for bringing it to our attention. Also a big Thank You for subscribing - Railway Herald is a small independent magazine and we rely on our subscribers to keep going. We always appreciate constructive feedback, and are currently looking at ways to update the Image Gallery, so any more thoughts on the subject are very welcome. We hope to implement changes to the Image Gallery section of the website very soon.

Cheers,

RHM

 

What's the attraction with having RH host your images if there seems a small chance that they will actually get displayed?

 

Very few images actually seem to get rejected, at least from reasonably competent photographers, the issue is the delay in getting them moderated so they become publicly viewable. If you've uploaded an image of a weekend tour, it can be rather frustrating if you can't post a link to it for a week because there's a delay in it being moderated.

So, what's the attraction? Like all image hosting sites, I guess it's just getting exposure for your images. In my experience, if you post up some images on flickr, you're lucky to get 100 views on each unless you market it on groups within flickr, or on external forums such as this. Even then, the image generally needs to be something exceptional, or very topical, to get more than a few hundred hits. My experiences of Railway Herald were that I'd get several hundred hits on almost everything I submitted (without any additional marketing) and that exposure lead to requests to use the images on far more occasions than flickr has - suggesting that the exposure may be of a higher 'quality', at least in terms of a railway audience. I haven't submitted anything to RH since they went 'subscription only', so I've no idea if it currently gives the same level of exposure (or better). These days, I'm quite happy to share my images with a few friends and leave it at that.

 

I have to say that, as far as image exposure is concerned, I think that the RH website has gone downhill quite a bit since it was re-launched a year or so ago. There were very useful features on the old site (Rail Diary, Rail tour Images, Event Galleries) that have yet to reappear in a working state on the new site or are not as frequently updated as they once were. On the old site, getting a day's images into the relevant event gallery or rail tour page guaranteed a good number of hits (500 plus per image wasn't unusual) in the short term and a steady trickle thereafter. The RH web site team used to be very prompt in setting up galleries for specific events, and just about every event, diesel as well as steam, got a gallery dedicated to it. Now it appears that very few events are deemed worthy of a gallery at all! The total so far this year is just six - the WSR and SVR Spring galas and Bluebell reopening, to name but three, have been totally ignored.

I would say that as a steady trickle, my images were averaging 300 or so hits per day on the old site. Now I'll get maybe 250-300 per image on the day that a batch of images gets through moderation, which drops off to typically between 100 and 150 hits per day in total across all my RH images thereafter.

The new RH website was also meant to be a news source - something that it is clearly failing to achieve when the latest news item on the site right now (22:00 on 13/04/2013) is over a month old. I really wonder if the RH editorial team have lost interest in the free parts of the website now that they have an income stream in the magazine.

Cheers,

 

Hi Mick,

Thanks for your points. We are currently working on the Imaging Centre and the news section of the website and hope to have updates published within a month.

As for the team losing interest because of the income stream generated by the magazine - if only!! We have such a small team and only have so many pairs of hands! The main focus of course, is the magazine itself and we pride ourselves in getting 48 pages published to a high standard every week. RH started as a hobby and rapidly expanded - we switched to subscriber-only format last year out of necessity, and kept the fees as low as possible. We don't make vast sums from advertising within the mag - news and articles make the vast bulk of the content - there is no advertising on the website either - subscriptions are the main source of income. It takes a lot of work to fill those 48 pages and with only 8 people on the team (mainly part-time), it's no mean feat! Unfortunately, other jobs sometimes fall by the wayside - the news page is one such thing. Thanks for your specific feedback on that - hopefully you will see the changes very soon.

Cheers