Hey.
So I thought I’d open this back up three months into my hunting prowess. Here are some suggestions and general feedback.
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Suggestions and Thoughts
Qualifying onto the SAC App
It might not really be a secret, but for a city to be added onto the Street Art Cities app it needs to have eight artworks. Then when the next day roll overs, it automatically appears as a city on the app.
Here is a list of NSW cities and Canberra, for what is available on the app and what isn’t. As one can deduce, there is a distinct cut-off of eight. Sadly, if you do not have eight artworks, the city won’t be featured on the SAC app.
Which is why I was very particularly detailed about a previous post I wrote Definition of a SAC City, which was not particularly well-read. It follows a specific order:
A. You may start off your hunt in your capital to represent the whole country/state (unless it’s completely on the other side). If (and only if) your capital is not yet on the map, then start with a major city. Otherwise, if you do not have enough in your starting city, stay hunting in the capital/major city.
B. If your city has grown with many artworks, break off into the smaller regional-level city/region/etc.
C. And if you are a smaller town break down even further! Unless you are within a major city (i.e. Cronulla in Sydney, Shinjuku in Tokyo, or Westminster in London, maybe a trail will do?)
The contrapositive may also apply:
C. If your small village/town does not have enough artworks to stand on its own in the app, join the regional major town/city.
B. If your region does not have enough, join the major city or capital in the state.
A. Which is why some people would prefer to hunt and document everything into one big city before branching and breaking off into others (if needed, which most of the time, it isn’t).
So many cities, particularly those with silo art are not included in the SAC app because they don’t have enough artworks. Simple as that. Quirindi, which won Australia’s Best Street Art Award for 2023 does not feature onto the SAC app because the town itself only has seven artworks in total.
I strongly believe there needs to be a framework which should be set and adhered to. I understand SAC is a global product with many minute nuances, but government (local councils and states) are transparent enough to map and divide out, so too will be hunters. But this current system means app-users (maybe 80% of traffic) miss out on many regional cities and silo art. Doesn’t matter if the town is rather fully complete (i.e. Grenfell’s one silo artwork), it won’t be in the SAC app, only visible on web.
I can flesh this out further with even more examples if you’re interested, and practical examples (i.e. many silo towns in Victoria could merge and actually have enough together to be in the app, alongside its regional city).
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Confusion over mini-regions as cities
A few weeks ago I requested the creation of the cities of Port Stephens and Southern Highlands, but was not able to because they’re “kind of a region”? So right now Nelson Bay and Bowral represent them respectively. It’s a bit confusing because Central Coast NSW and Blue Mountains NSW exist as regions that represent their areas very well. Otherwise Gosford and Katoomba would represent both of them instead, leaving out the rest of the area (they’re not particularly representative of what’s been mapped throughout).
What’s the guidelines regarding this? Also can we please get rid of the ‘NSW’ or ‘VIC’ or whatever state is at the end of each of the cities? It’s been a while since I’ve requested for this because only the tech guys can do this (plus Portland NSW to Lithgow). Oh, and West Australië from the two in WA also.
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Region/State View or Country View
I would like to see another parent layer in Street Art Cities: the Country/Region View! In this view, you can see:
- Nearby states/territories or countries
- The overall progress of the region and total artworks
- All of its hunters.
I’d also like to see some more layers and sorting. Particularly for this case below where all of my cities are listed in alphabetical order, but not by country. A second level sorting would be great, either by country or preferably by state.
Below, we have all of them in New South Wales, one in Western Australia, and one in Korea?! This dropdown list can get a bit long. That way, the Richmond in Victoria won’t be confused with the Richmond in New South Wales, or the Richmond in Queensland.
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Custom Icons
In the Tips for optimizing your images post, I learned that it would be preferred to add the overview image first, followed by the rest of the details. While I have reversed this, I’m still a bit on the fence.
I’d like to be able to adjust the icon (based on either the main photo or maybe a custom upload), to add that additional amount of curator power for the map.
For example, for long-artworks, this might work rather than the full overview as the icon. Two examples below for what I would use as icons (right would be the zoom I would use):
Some icons look too small to get that grasp of grandeur, so I’d like to try and reel in the viewer to click through by capturing them with the detail first. The opposite also works too, but I’d like this to be led by choice.
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Change the Location, Keep the Address
Geolocation is by far a feature that, although has been resolved with a considerable solution, the underlying issue still remains. When even slightly adjusting the pin on the map, the SAC dashboard will change it an auto-generated address or sometimes worse, attach it to a business or building.
For example, in Kempsey, the only address in a laneway of artworks should be Savages Lane, Kempsey. Instead the artworks are incorrectly listed as the following addresses:
- Centrepoint Arcade, Smith St
- Shop 1/14 Smith St
- Shop 19-20 Centrepoint Arcade, 14 Smith St
- 18 Smith Street
- 11 Clyde Street
- 16-20 Clyde Street
The problem is, if you type in Savages Lane, the pin will take you there, but when you move it, it will revert to either. Placing the pin, but typing in Savages Lane resets its address.
There needs to be a way to lock the address within the dashboard and not let it change when moving the pin. One typical example would be Hosier Lane, there might not be a particular number for where the artwork resides, but try to move it around the top part and you’ll end up with auto-filled Flinders Lane instead. Let me type in the correct address (i.e. Savages Lane, Kempsey), click some sort of checkbox to stop the address from changing, and then let me move the pin to where it is exactly, without it changing to Smith or Clyde Street. That would solve some hesitation around geopositioning.
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Adding More Than Five Artists
Some artworks have more than five artists. Not just the main directing or leading artist, but every single individual. If the artist doesn’t already appear in the database, there is no option to add one and I’ll get “No options” instead. Would you be able to change this limit to say… maybe 10?
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Dates?!
No I am not asking for a coffee date here (maybe later). Is there any particular reason why the SAC dashboard uses the MM-DD-YYYY format? And then in the front-facing web version, it uses YYYY-MM-DD? Can we try to standardise, maybe by DD-MM-YYYY? My preference, unless this was made in the US.
Also, there are times when we do not know the exact date, but we might know the month, or the year. Can we slightly change this input so that we can remove DD and MM if we don’t know the particular date? It would save having to revert to MM/01/YYYY to state that it was painted within that month, but it may confuse artworks that were actually painted on the actual first day of the month. And a worded date for any front-facing sites: i.e. 21-12-2023 should be worded as 21 December 2023, 02-2024 should be read as February 2024 if DD is blank, 1999 should read as 1999 with the others blank.
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Revising the Tags Section
Perhaps you might want to look at the backend and see which are the widely used tags, and which ones aren’t. However, I think there could be some useful additions and some that are rather obsolete as follows:
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Artist nationality: increasingly obsolete. Instead of each of the artist’s artworks all Artist nationality, I believe it should be captured in the artist’s page. Even better if they have control of it to add that in themselves in their bio!
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Height: I would tend to write its dimensions in the artwork description. It’s also not very useful as a tag because how many artworks are we looking to find with the tag “17 metres”?
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Photographer: What’s the difference between using this tag for Photographer and adding the Photographer Name for each image? I think this is duplicative and could be removed.
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Width: See Height. It’s a bit of something that could be trimmed.
Maybe we could add a new tag or work on the existing Artwork status tag?
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Condition: This is objective. When there are a few community notes stating that an artwork has been tagged, what do we do with it? Write in the description that it’s been tagged? Or that it’s colours are significantly faded? Or if it’s obscured by a building or growing vines or something? We could try to add something like condition or status, maybe like a five-level scale?
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Last updated: I’d like to request an automatic tag that updated itself based on the last time the artwork was updated on the dashboard. This help gives SAC users a bit more insight into an artwork. An artwork painted in 2013, but a hunter updated it a week ago? Looks like it’ll be there for sure! An artwork painted in 2019, but uploaded in 2020? Not sure if it is still there four years later…
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Personal Stats and Profile
Below is a mockup of what stats might be measured on the app. I’d like a place to be able to see my aggregate stats across all cities (the only one I see is the city page where it shows how much has been hunted) and tracking my hunter journey so far. Here’s what it could look like on the profile page (this example is a mock-up from Google Maps). Is there a way to see our stats?
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All the Photos I Upload are Mine
Filling and copy-pasting my name in each of the photos could be better automated. Sometimes it’s two or three, other times it’s more than 10. Can there be a function that will auto-fill any empty photographer names to have the name of the hunter who uploaded them? For the most part, it will generally be the hunter who has also taken the photo they have uploaded too, but if they have got it with permission from somewhere else, they can add the source’s name instead and it won’t autofill to the hunter’s name because it’s already filled with someone else’s.
Do we always assume hunters have uploaded their own photos unless otherwise specified? For the ones I added to in Perth, I added the original hunter’s name to each of the existing photos.
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SAC app marker clustering and density
While the web version of SAC is wonderful, this change hasn’t flowed through to the mobile version yet (neither has the disambiguation option). Will this flow through to the mobile app sometime?
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Bugs & Improvements
Loading Tags
For every single artwork I upload or update, I have to wait five seconds for this spinning wheel in the tags section to load, mainly because I want to add information such as the Date Painted and/or Festival. This has become very annoying over time.
Can this section be loaded in the background of the div, or maybe pre-load some tags by default such as Date Added? I remember it used to have a few which appeared by default before an update in January?
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Date created/removed and Camera used
As already expressed above, except it shows the 24-hour time as well, down to the millisecond. Everything from the T onwards (as below) should be removed.
Also, while I appreciate the camera used tag, I strongly believe this metadata should be stored within each of the photos themselves instead of with the overarching artwork itself. As I tend to do, I like to finely curate artworks, even if it means uploading my photos to existing hunted artworks. So if the existing camera used is a Huawei ELE-L29, but I’ve now added in my photos from a Canon EOS 200D II, what should I do? Remove the camera used?
Image metadata is for the most part, harmless if you get rid of the location. I’d like for it to capture dates as well, so many different hunters can contribute to an artwork which shows it change or hold up over time. Or do you only want the original hunter’s photos on the one that they’ve hunted themselves?
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There are a few more that I’ve mentioned (probably twice now) over the past few months, but I think a lot of development has happened this year. Sorting by artist name (or whether they have an artist or not) in all ‘All artworks’ page, leaderboards of some sort, and other sorts of things.
I’ll keep on asking for advice and plug in my ideas/feedback over time (hopefully this wasn’t too confusing, or too long). I know I’d like to have more people join as fellow hunters across New South Wales (I really should get that call out), but slowly I really do hope people do pick this up and recognise the work that you all and every hunter pits into this.
Anywho, time really does fly, 3 months of 2024 has already passed. Still a lot more hunting to do, although far less given there is no more Daylight Saving Time. Darker mornings, already sunset by 5:30pm after next weekend. Not optimal hunting. Lots more to do around Sydney.
All the best!
J