What if I told you that, after years of requests for the return of my Stardancer.org gallery, I was in the process of recreating it?

Because I am…! RIGHT NOW. flail

CHALLENGES
First, let me tell you why I haven’t had an online art gallery since stardancer went down:

I did not want to put thousands of images on free gallery sites (like DA) because it would be a ton of work, and I wouldn’t have any control over the site (“what if they go down one day”, “what if they start charging per-upload fees”, “what if they have copyright policy changes I don’t like”, “what if they start using their corpus to train AI”, etc, etc, etc). Can you imagine dumping hundreds of hours into uploading stuff only to lose it because the site owners made questionable decisions? Ugh.

I wasn’t capable of coding my own gallery and I didn’t like the gallery plugins for various content management systems. I could have installed a package on my hosting service, but none of the ones I saw were customizable enough, or did everything I needed, or felt robust enough. Also a lot of them are just ugly.

I was exhausted at the prospect of the art workload: scanning, trimming, watermarking, resizing-for-the-web, and labeling thousands of scans. Because it’s not enough that there are 200+ sketchbooks in need of scanning (which takes, on average, about 2 hours per book if I stand over the scanner and turn pages until I’m done)… if I’m scanning them at archival quality, then those are way too big for the web. They need to be prepped.

Combined, these issues were enough to put me off the project indefinitely.

…until AI.

MAGIC
Yesterday, I woke up at 7 am and thought, ‘but what if I didn’t have to modify any of the files I scanned? What if I could just upload them and the gallery would do all the resizing and trimming and watermarking and tagging? Is that a thing?’

Turns out, it’s totally a thing, because in less than 15 hours I went from ‘this is an idea in my head’ to a working prototype, where I just dump my scanned art into a directory and the gallery app automatically converts, watermarks, and labels it based on the filename… then puts up all the thumbnails on a (paginated!) gallery page so you can look through them; click on them and see the full sized image; and even filter them by sketchbook, date, or tag.

I can’t tell you how crazy it is that this is a thing that was do-able in such a short amount of time.

BUT WAIT!

…you say! The files are there, but almost no meta-data! Are you going to go back to the old stardancer model of a sketch title, a description, and tags for books and characters and etc, etc? What about user comments? We used to be able to leave comments!

Lemme tell you my plans:

VOLUME FIRST. Right now all metadata is provided by the filename (because I’ve always embedded the sketchbook number, page, date, and a short description of the contents in the file names). But I’m planning two tagging methods: a wiki-based method, where if the image is linked from one of my wikis, the gallery will tag it with the wiki categories; and a user-volunteered method, where you all can add tags if you want! I’m going with these methods because I’m planning an unprecedented volume of art uploads. Before I would curate all the sketches and only bother to upload maybe 10% of a sketchbook’s total pages. Now, I’m going to dump the entire book up there (minus any missing pages). At once.

Please imagine hundreds of pages becoming available at a time. Picture receiving an email from Patreon: “Hey, everyone, I just finished scanning Sketchbook 88 this afternoon and it’s up! Go enjoy!”

USER-LED. In addition to letting people tag the images (I’m going to be one of them!), I’m also going to let you favorite images and save searches and filters. So say you only ever want peltedverse stuff, or B&W art, or if you’re reading the Jokka trilogy and want to see only images from those books, then you can set the gallery to show you things you want. Eventually I’m going to use that favorite data to pick out pictures that everyone likes, so I can finish them! Or I’ll use that data to make sure people’s favorites go into the forthcoming art books (“Everyone likes this Tam-illee girl from Sketchbook 5… definitely going into the book!”). Eventually I’d like to make it so you can get prints or merch made by selecting a piece from the gallery and handing it off to Printful—I’ve got a cropping function partially built so if you want to adjust the picture before you send it off somewhere, you can do that.

I’m not anticipating reinstating user comments, mostly because it didn’t get much use back in Stardancer’s heyday—it was mostly the same 15 people or so leaving comments—so I’m replacing it with the much faster/easier favorite system so you can locate your favorites and share them easily. Also this means I don’t have to police comments, and before you say ‘But Jaguar, most of your fans aren’t trolls!’, I’ll say, ‘Yes, but think about people accidentally leaving spoilers on images.’ I’d much rather build a share function so you can show friends your favorite pieces of art (“Have you gotten to the part in Mindtouch where XYZ? Look, there’s an illustration, squee!”). I can revisit other forms of interaction later!

ARTIST GETS GROCERIES. Because I’m anticipating this gallery getting enormous in size very quickly, the majority of it will be available only to subscribers of some flavor or another. Guests will be able to browse a ‘best of’ page that will have a random image/image of the day, top five user favorites, five newest uploads, etc, and probably have a budget (‘browse 20 images a month’) but I’m going to code it so that browsing the entire archive will be a subscriber-only perq. This gives my patreon/locals people an enormous value-add for their money, and incidentally pays for the ongoing effort of scanning and the hosting costs because I need to check and see what my file limits are for my host….

Also why I’m not terribly concerned about piracy and AI theft (inevitable risks are inevitable), I’d like to introduce enough friction to the process that it becomes less of a thing.

If you are already a patron of some kind (here or via other forms of patronage, like shopping at my store), rest assured I’m making notes on how to link up all your various jaguar accounts (including the wiki ones) so that I’m at least aware of you everywhere. I’m not sure I’ll be able to swing single-login, but I’m definitely committed to making access as transparent/easy as possible so that if you are buying me coffee monthly, you will have your Full Gallery Access with no further work on your part.

GREAT SO WHEN DO WE GET IT
Maybe a month? I’m going to be building it and testing it extensively (and if you really want constant progress reports, I post those on discord as I work on things). Discord is also where I’ll go to get beta testers. Otherwise… it’s going pretty quickly. I have a big checklist but I’m making good time. As you can see from the screenshots, the core functionality’s already there… it’s just a matter of all the added features (and the final part, which is making it look like the rest of my site… my placeholder CSS is hideous, lol).

So yes. I am aiming for the end of summer for launch, and we’ll see if I make it.

The tldr;: the gallery is finally coming back!