Fix the "photo shuffling" when submitting new places.#312

Whenever I go to edit a place from my drafts, the photo order is reversed. This means that the photo I’ve selected as the “cover photo” is now last, and the last photo is now the cover. I’m not sure if this problem is the same when submitting a place instead of saving it to the drafts, since I always check my work before submitting.

As far as I can see, there are two possible solutions to this:

1. Simply find a way to prevent the reversing of the photo order (so the first photo uploaded becomes the cover, as is logical).
2. Have a dedicated field for the “cover photo” which will always show up as the photo in lists and destination guides. This would probably do better and remove any ambiguity as to where your intended cover photo will show up in the pecking order.

Also, I’m not sure if this should be classified as a separate issue, but why are the cover photos on an author’s “submitted” page different from the cover photos everywhere else? That doesn’t make a lot of sense.

It would also be nice to be able to rearrange the photos before submission because they often get scrambled, especially when adding new photos later. This is especially a problem on geographically extended places where there may be several dispersed sites, and they all get mixed together. My recent publication on US 6 in Nevada:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/us-6-in-nevada
is an example, where pix from the old ranch site and the Montgomery Pass complex are all scattered around. It seems they really should be grouped together. I had figured the editors might do the rearranging since I couldn’t, but that didn’t happen.

Yeah, a way to “grab” each photo to rearrange it could work. Same functionality as rearranging lists on AO.

@Mikewalker thanks for the detailed description of the photos issue. We have the ability to change the order and set what we call the “thumbnail image” on the backend so this is a good suggestion for the places submission form interface/ place page.

why are the cover photos on an author’s “submitted” page different from the cover photos everywhere else? That doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Can you post a screenshot/example of this ^ issue so I can see where the photos are not displaying the correct cover image?

@Nicola Sure! Here’s a screenshot of the destination guide for Los Alamos, NM, where I’ve added several places, including Pierotti’s Clowns Monument and the Mysterious Carved Rocks. You can see the Clowns one uses a different image on my Places Added page. You can see the same thing with Teakettle Rock in Jemez Springs. Place guide uses one image, Added page uses another.

I’m commenting to ask if there’s been any progress on this front. The photo shuffling remains the most frustrating part of place submission. It would be nice to have some kind of interface where we drag photos into their proper order, but at the very least, couldn’t the first photo uploaded be saved as the cover photo? One of my most recent submissions, the newly approved Santuari de Meritxell, was shuffled post submission to show the old church instead of the cloisters of the modern one referenced in the title. It makes me want to caption the photos with numbers to show the intended order.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/basilica-santuari-de-nostra-senyora-de-meritxell

I have a feeling that the picture order is entirely up to the editors and is not fully decided on until right before publication.

Seems to me that the general intention is to order them by relevance and appearance. For my submissions of museums, for example, I’ll often choose the main picture to be the building’s facade or entrance sign. To me it makes sense that the picture is what a visitor would be likely to see first when looking for the museum.

However, if my description says something like “this museum houses a collection of abstract pottery”, and the team keeps the gist of that for publication, the main picture they choose will instead be of one of said pottery items. The first few pictures will indeed be similar items, and the museum building will be moved to 4th or 5th position.

I don’t often agree with the choices, but for the most part understand them. I’ve only ever decided to raise it directly with them when I strongly disagree with the choice. So overall, I think that this comes down to editorial decisions after submission, rather than system glitches or similar. I did upvote the suggestion, because I think there’s technical limitations, and the pictures do shuffle between edits, while the Place hasn’t been submitted yet.