PISA-caching
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I quote myself:
On 8/1/2023 at 7:28 AM, PISA-caching said:If I were able to answer that question thoroughly, I would code the next version of Photoshop.
As a total idiot on AI matters, I would say that several (positive and negative) answers to cobblestone photos will (if at all) improve further cobblestone photos and nothing more.
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On 7/31/2023 at 7:26 PM, Becktracker said:
Musical instruments might accept it..
Thanks. This is more like a bell than a Musical instrument, but I will give it a try. -> Accepted, thanks a lot.
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8 hours ago, ScroogieII said:
In what way would Photoshop's learning to correctly render cobblestones around a fountain (which it appears not to have learned) help to improve its ability to correctly render pilasters on a Byzantine church (an example of which the one above is not, BTW
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I don't think that the learning process is that fast, that one thumbs up or down with change anything, but other than that: If I were able to answer that question thoroughly, I would code the next version of Photoshop.
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Welcome back, Country_Wife,
I also think that Having fun is the most important Do, both as an officer and poster/visitor.
On 7/10/2023 at 8:49 AM, FamilieFrohne said:The image quality gets reduced - sometimes drastically - when cropping an image. This cropped image delivers seldom additional detail to enhance the waymark, so it may considered useless. But that depends on the waymark and on the images provided. It would be acceptable for me as an officer if this cropped image is an additional image to point out some detail (i.e. making it the third image then ...).
That's true in general, but not all the time.
When I take pictures with my camera, the resolution is 5472 x 3648. If I uploaded the original size, it would be decreased by Groundspeak to 2048 x 1365 or something like that. Therefore I decrease the resolution to 2250 x 1500 before uploading them and most of the time, the photos will have that size in the end. On very rare occasions I crop 2250 x 1500 pixels (or more) of the original photo (with no loss of image quality) and I end up with one photo with original 2250x1500 pixels cut out of one my photos and exactly that photo decreased by me to 2250x1500.
As an officer I decide depending on the quality of the photos. If the first photo has low quality and the second one is a part of that, I might deny it. If there are two photos in very good quality and one is obviously cut out of the other, but both are in good quality and showing either details of the object in question or additional surroundings, it's ok for me. If I just had my mobile phone I would take a picture of the object, zoom out and take another photo at the same position. That's almost equal to what I get when I crop something out of a big photo.
Just to avoid misunderstandings: I almost always make two or more distinct photos, just to be sure, but there are situations, where the fotographer took two photos and lateron finds out that one of them is not good or he/she thought that only one photo in necessary for a visit and lateron finds out that nobody has made a WM for that object yet etc. And my advice is: Ask yourself, what other WMers will think about the WM, if they see it. Will they be angry, because the WM has a cropped photo, or is the long description so well written, that nobody cares for the "missing" photo? There are WM where there are 2 distinct photos, from far away, taken within 3 seconds, some text copied from somewhere and obviously the WM owner spend only little time to create it. In these cases I would search for a reason to deny it. 1. to teach the WM owners to invest more time and effort 2. to keep the category interesting.
AND, it's not just the number of photos. The category description of the Ice Cream Parlors says "At least TWO photos are required! One must show the entire shop, the other needs to be a clear close-up showing a sign or lettering identifying the shop. Additional photos are encouraged." and the category description says "This category now requires a minimum of two unique sentences describing the establishment and/or your personal experience (if you actually patronized the place) in the long description. Failure to add the minimum two-sentence requirement will result in your waymark getting declined.". So, it's not just the number of photos that separates good WMs from not so good ones.
But I'm sure, that you will do just fine and if you're uncertain, you can always find advice here or by PN.
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When I visited a monastery in Romania, I saw this interesting thing:
It's a thick metal plate, hung on a pole (about 1 m high) and some people might call it a "Bell", because it is made of metal and it's used to call the nuns to a mess like bells in catholic churches/monasteries. But, from Wikipedia I learned that this is a metal-made Semantron (never heard that before). Now, the question is: Will it be accepted in the Bells category?
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3 hours ago, ScroogieII said:
Your description of Photoshop "learning" capabilities, seems just a bit "off" to me. Photoshop itself doesn't seem to me to be learning anything, just offering a random selection of renderings from which you choose the best, at which time it generates yet another random set of renderings. It's unclear to me whether each generation of renderings always becomes more acceptable than the previous generation. Does it?
Well, I assume (but haven't found any prove of my theory yet), that my decisions (thumbs up or down) are reported to Adobe and that that will help Photoshop to give better results in the future. Whenever I click on thumbs up or down, a small overlay appears saying "Tell us more" (in German as I use a German Photoshop) and when I click on that I can give further information. I can rate 4 statements:
1. I would use that result for my project
2. The result fits to my text input.
3. The result looks credible.
4. The result fits well with the rest of my picture.
All these statements I can rate with "Disagree completely", "Don't agree", "Neutral", "Agree" or "Agree absolutely". And I can add a text note, which someone (or the AI?) will read. So, I think that this will not just help MY copy of Photoshop, but all the Photoshop user out there. I learned that if I use "Generative Fill", the original photo is sent to Adobe, processed there and sent back to me. All that makes me believe that this is (at least in a way) a learning software.
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12 hours ago, ScroogieII said:
In the case of Photoshop I think not, as AI involves reasoning, self learning and self teaching, which I doubt takes place within Photoshop.
Photoshop generates content for the empty pixels that I added to the left, bottom and right of my original photo. It not just generates one version, but three and I can judge every version with thumbs up or down. That's the learning process for Photoshop. Thousands of Photoshop users do that all the time and Photoshop is constantly learning, what is good or bad. When I made the photo above, one version contained a big terracotta vase on the right side :-), which of course received a thumbs down. And it took about 20 versions before one was generated that received a thumbs up by me.
I agree that the result isn't perfect, but there are two main reasons for that: 1. This is a Beta version, that didn't have much time to learn so far. 2. I'm not at all a specialist in Photoshop and with more Know-How and time I'm quite confident that I would have been able to remove/avoid the errors you mentioned. In fact, I was not really satisfied with the front corner of the stone base of the fountain and removed a small part and let Photoshop again fill it, until I was satisfied. And Photoshop added some kind of table or something to the top right corner, that I would have removed if I had more time.
Apart from all that, I agree with both of you, that improving the lightning, removing trash or passengers etc. is ok. At least I could have removed the trash myself before taking the photo or wait until the passenger is gone. I did all that myself and I used a Canon software to combine several of my photos to a panorama photo. It's just that I think that adding completely new content to a photo is questionable, when it changes the main motif of the photo. Here's another photo I increased to the left and bottom:
One of the generated versions added a small tower on the back side of the church. I think we all agree, that this is not ok. Also, I'm pretty sure that the indicated columns on the left side of the building reach from the roof to the floor in reality, which they don't on the Photoshop image.
I'm just curious, where all this will lead. Will there be times, where I can download a photo from the internet and tell Photoshop "change the point of view 20° to the west and make the shadows look as if the photo was taken on the afternoon" etc. This would make it almost impossible for officers to tell, if the photo was stolen from the internet or not.
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Lately I started experimenting with the new Beta version of Adobe Photoshop. With it I was able to expand a photo of a fountain and let Photoshop fill the empty space around it. The result is stunning (if you ask me). Judge for yourself:
Left is of course my original photo. I created a WM for that fountain and of course I used only the original photo. But what do you think? Would it be ok (in your opinion), to cut out - let's say - some dirt or other distracting things and let Photoshop fill the hole? And where's the limit then? One limit I could think of is: The motif of the photo has to stay untouched, meaning: To expand or modify the motif of the photo (like I did above) is not ok, pimping the surroundings is ok, as long as it doesn't completely change the look. I don't plan to use AI to modify my photos, but I'm eager to hear what you think about it.
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33 minutes ago, TheDoctor12 said:
Well I seemed to get a souvenir today after logging finds on 2 successive days - the Project APE one! I guess HQ will fix this tomorrow ...
Same happened to me in Moldova, where I spend part of my vacations right now. I never thought I would receive that souvenir. WooooHooo!!! I will celebrate the short time it will show up in my souvenirs list.
Just for the records: I found one traditional yesterday and Earthcache, Virtual and Multi today.
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On 12/8/2022 at 2:42 PM, PISA-caching said:
You may also think about including Euro Souvenir Note (euronotesouvenir.ie) machines. Just an idea.
Like I already mentioned in December, I think that machines, that are selling Souvenir Euro bills should be included also. I found these machines several times and in some places the bills are also sold in tourist shops, but I would include just the machines as described in the category description. The (unfortunately German only) website https://www.0-euro-scheine.de/liste?pagelength=-1 shows a lot of these bills. Not all of them refer to locations, but to persons, events etc. and not all of them will be sold in machines, but it will give you an idea of how widespread these bills are. Interestingly, there is also a 0 Euro bill for the Pyramids in Egypt, one for Bahrain, one for Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and many other locations that our far outside the Euro zone.
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On 6/16/2023 at 4:21 PM, Vicious Cycle said:
First of all...thank you for the very warm welcome.
You are correct to assume my online moniker is derived from another hobby of mine, namely cycling.
A very warm welcome from Vienna, Austria (not AustrALia!
). You will find several intersting categories regarding cycling on Waymarking.com, like:
Electric Bike Charging Stations
Mountain Bike Trailheads ........
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"We Are Farmers" Group Details (Waymarking.com), but I'm not really interested in that topic.
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8 minutes ago, Becktracker said:
... the object isn't centrally located in the photo(s)....
Maybe a useful hint: Both my camera and my mobile phone can make panorama images. I try to make panorama images in places, where there are many objects, that might be waymarkable. And later I can crop all the parts of the panorama image that I need for the various waymarks.
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I also agree, but have to admit, that (regarding to the quoted text problem) I sometimes have a problem with the description of my WMs. Example: I do some research on something. If I'm lucky, I find a good wikipedia page (or any other website) about it, explaining the architectural details of it, the history, etc. So, I can either copy and paste the text of that webpage or try to write my own text and just take small portions of text from these webpages. And additionally, most of the time I try to provide some text in English (of course), but also in the local language, which is sometimes very difficult, because I don't know that language at all. Example (one of my older WMs): https://Waymarking.com/waymarks/wmVNE0. For this WM I used some text of the Danish and English Wikipedia pages. Of course I could have made my own description of Nyboder (in my mother tongue German) and translate it to English and Danish, but I admit that I was a little lazy at that time and if I did add my own description, I wouldn't want to have the same information in the wikipedia part and my own words. So, I would have to write my own description without any information that is already in the Wikipedia text or leave it in my own text delete the redundant information in the wikipedia text. No matter, how I do that, it's a lot more work for me, than it is for somebody who creates WM in their own country in their own language, which is English.
Note: This is not to complain, but to EXplain my problem and probably the problem of other WMers.
And regarding the photos: Most of my waymarks have photos, that I took with my camera, but sometimes I coincidentally find objects/places when I don't have my camera with me. In these situations I take photos with my mobile phone, and I know that they will never be as good as the photos of my camera, but I take them with the best resolution that my mobile phone offers and I take more than I need to make sure that at least some of them will be better than others. But I also had to review WM with photos that are far smaller than a usual computer display. Sometimes I suspect that they are taken from a geocache, because they are pretty small and approximately the size you might find in geocache galleries.
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I added a new rule to the description of Counting and Measuring Displays.
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On 6/19/2023 at 10:44 PM, Benchmark Blasterz said:
HMMMM - I think I have shown that this is not a one-and-done category for me, but I accept that water bottle stations are not interesting - unless it is the one you got the icon for! HA
I will try and refrain from submitting others, even though I live in hope that I can help someone with a tough icon.
There's no need to completely stop posting them to the category, but one per user and state will keep their numbers down. And I can understand that you posted them, so that others can at least post a visit in that category. But on the other hand: If a waymarker finds such a display and there is no waymark for it yet, he/she can easyly post a WM for it and get the icon. The requirements for this category aren't that difficult. :-)
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On 6/17/2023 at 3:43 PM, Becktracker said:
You can off course edit the category description....
As I am the leader of that category and the one that had the idea for it, that's exactly what I was planning to do.
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15 hours ago, Becktracker said:
...you are forced to accept them...
Is that really so? Is there any such "rule" that I can read somewhere?
I don't want to deny all of them, but with "one 'bottles saved' WM per user per state/region/province" every WMer around the world still has the chance to find at least a 'bottles saved" display (if not any other display that is more interesting) and post it. -
15 hours ago, ScroogieII said:
Now about the pez dispensers, how many do you have? How many different ones could one have?
I counted them years ago and as far as I remember there were around 1,000. So, meanwhile I estimate them to be 1,300 - 1,500. I could "visit" the Photo Goal Hold Your Collection - Photo Goals on Waymarking.com (with part of my collection
), but that would add a find in California to my statistics, without ever having been there in person.
Worldwide there are countless variations, stem colors etc., so it's impossible to say how many different ones one could have.
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On 8/26/2019 at 11:42 AM, PISA-caching said:
I've never seen one of these in my part of the world. Therefore I would accept them and hope that no waymarker will post tons of the same kind of counter.
I wrote that years ago and referred to the "bottles saved" displays. It seems that my hope was in vain. The "Counting and Measuring Displays" category is cluttered with the displays on water dispensers. Not what I had in mind, when I started that category.
So, is there a chance to stop / slow down that flood? Something like one water dispenser per user per region/country? What do my other officers and everybody else think?
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The flint types would be redundant to "Places of Geologic Significance", no? Or do I misunderstand?
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5 hours ago, ScroogieII said:
What else do I not know about you that I feel I should, in order to keep thinking of you as a friend?!?!?!?!?!?
That's a difficult question. If I told you other secrets, it might help to continue our friedship or it might end it.
5 hours ago, ScroogieII said:Do you root for Moldavia (instead of Austria) in Football? Do you think hockey isn't a real sport? Do you think vanilla ice cream is a communist plot?
The world needs to know!!!
- I'm not much interested in sports, or soccer in particular. That's why I don't have many WMs in sports categories, but I will travel to Romania and coincidentally Moldova very soon and hope to increase their number of (currently 9) WMs dramatically.
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There are other sports, that I don't think are real sports, like Cherry Pit Spitting.
- I think, vanilla ice cream is one of the most borings icecreams that exist, but has nothing to do with communists.
Are we still friends? Please!
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I found a good list of archaeological cultures on the German Wikipedia page Liste archäologischer Kulturen – Wikipedia. Not all of them are named after an archaeological site and the list is definitely not complete, but it's a long and worldwide list.
And one for Romania (because I visit that country soon): Romanian archaeology - Wikipedia
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Which category for this?
in General Waymarking Topics
Posted
During our vacation in Moldova I noticed a building with the Olympic Rings above the entrance. A little later I learned that it is the building of the National Olympic Committee. Now I wonder: Is there a category for these headquarters? I thought about Olympic Memorabilia, but although they list several Do's and Don't's I have no idea, if they would accept it.