Hello!
To use the forum, login or register above.
(If you are already logged in above, please click here)
Sticker sheets - missing images
Many older sets do not have an image of the sticker sheet. This makes it very difficult to check if a used set is complete or not. I propose to accept - as alternate image - a photo of the stickered parts coming in such set. It could be helpful too if the number of stickers on such sheet is mentioned in the sticker sheet name. Another idea would be to link the sticker sheet to the corresponding stickered parts.
Powered by Vanilla
Comments
Hi Renate, one of the options is to chase such stickers on other websites and make a scan of it, I frequently do so on older sheets, I resell them afterwards ;-)
When it comes down to posting all Stickered parts in one shot and present it as sticker sheet, not sure if @Lawrence will approve, his desicion, the inconveniance of it is that buyers might be expecting the parts as well, and it would most certainly look a bit weird if sellers are selling 'new' ones.
If sellers are selling them, have you tried asking whether they would be so kind to upload a scan? Obviously some sellers are not contributing at all, or hardly, but in cases like this, they might jump to it, after all, without a scan, they will have less chance to sell them because buyers might hesitate to buy when there is no image...
Cheers, Eric
I know how to find the images, no problem for me. But don't we want to have a helpful catalog for Brick Owl users ??? Not every Brick Owl customer will look elsewhere, Brick Owl should have the most complete catalog for its users. Uploading a scanned image from other sources is not allowed, and there are not so many sellers who have the complete old sheet in hand. So we should find a way how to make the old set inventories really complete, my post was meant as an invitation to some brainstorming, everybody welcome!
I agree that unfortunately some sellers are not contributing to the catalog, many may hesitate as it's really time consuming. But when I upload pictures for parts that others offer, I always have a feeling of injustice, as these sellers take profit of our work. You are the one with the most submissions (an outstanding number), but did you ever hear a thank you from other sellers?
Renate
I did not mean take pictures elsewhere, I meant 'buy' them, then scan them ;-)
I also buy decorated items for that purpose, then just resell them after uploading images...
Thank you's, well not that many, that's true, but occasionally over the past years I had quite a bunch of private or public ones, but it's not really important for me, I like the product, and in many cases it helps my store, particulary on BO: more attraction due to the variaty, and the incentive of free fees is nice, so I won't complain over the lack of thank you's...
And yes, BO's catalog still needs a lot of 'filling', but remember it's only 2.5 years old, so obviously if you compare it to other databases there's a lot of images missing, but then those databases have been around for over a decade, 1.5 decades if you compare to BL or Peeron ;-)
Just give it time...
Cheers, Eric
PS and Renate, thank you for *your* contributions :-)
@Robernat buying items to take pictures and then reselling, that's really great, everybody wins. Before Brick Owl was released, I intended to do that myself, back when I had grandiose ideas of having free time. Maybe one day.
that's why I was asking for a brainstorming, there is certainly someone who has an idea how we could easily implement information about a sticker sheet without image. Most of the old sets are normally sold used and come with stickers applied, so information should be available for buyers to check if a set is really complete. Buying original vintage sheets for taking photos costs many many $$, and some will not even be available. I remember that it took me more than a year to get hold of the original sticker sheets for 365 and 3672.
In the first inventories I submitted, I made alternate groups to show the stickered parts as alternate. But this didn't work well, the inventories were wrong afterwards (I noticed this later but didn't have the time yet to correct them).
BTW, inluding the number of stickers in the name of the sheet would already be a certain help for buyers (the old sheets did not have many stickers on them, so this would be easy).
I currently have +330 items in my inventory without image :-(
count about 5 to 10 min to take each item out of inventory, take an image, process it (white balance, cropping, etc), upload it, then put the part back, and I would need around 24-40 hours just to do so, considering I *could* spend 4 hours a week doing that, it would take about 3 months just to do those :-(
Well Renate, for starters I recommend to use BS to sync your inventory, it's gonna save you a massive amount of time compared to manual syncing, I did do myself the first 10 months or so, compared to now that was really intensive work, not to mention the 'errors'. Moving over from manual to automatic syncing was also abig deal, but now that I'm fully synced I can tell it saves 85-90% of time... I still process my picking sheets, but that's because I have more items in stock then listed, so I need to adjust after picking. Over time this will dry out because now I list full quantity on standard parts (not stickers/figs/minifig parts though), when I have the time to recount (during picking).
I did oftenly keep an eye on decorated items when picking BL orders, but I do a lot less now, I regulary notice when deleting empty lot's that got generated by BL orders, that there is no image on BO, but I can't see myself checking each lot to make sure I take an image for BO when selling on BL, it just takes a massive amount of time.
Another problem is 'lightning' to take images, I'm not really setup to be able to take images any time of day. I've been planning to make a lightcase, but everytime I wanna start making one, something comes up :-(