I know this has been raised in various forms before, but I'd like to draw attention to it again.

I think picture prompts should be there as default / standard in the study interface.

I'm talking about the guys paying for Getty Images or something, and getting an intern to go through and add relevant images to as many items as possible.

This is to make it possible to move away from English -> Chinese mental translation, and go directly from seeing something to thinking of the Chinese word. I know you can enable zh-cn-zh, but that's not how recalling a word works in the real world.

Yes there are some flaws with this, one image won't fit all meanings etc. But I think an image is more mentally versatile than a definition in either language.

I agree entirely with your reasoning. When I was in China I took quite a few photos with the intent of studying on that basis.

From the Skritter site perspective I guess the reasons may be technical and commercial. Image storage and transmission is going to dramatically increase remote storage and bandwith requirements.

I guess another issue is that whereas vocabulary is universal, images as representation are not, so it would be difficult make it a default.

As a compromise, maybe it is possible to have local images (e.g. photos on your PC) that people could tag, and get Skritter to incorporate them in reviews? Rather than just a custom word list, a custom image list (with word tags)? That would be a great feature.

Well, the commercial issue is why I mentioned using something like Getty Images. Presumably there's some sort of license that could be worked out.

Yeah I agree that images aren't universal, but an imperfect solution can still be a large improvement.

I think seeing an image would be very helpful to learners, especially once you get past the early stages.

It's not like it has to be 100% comprehensive or anything; my attitude is just "the more images the better".

I'd rather not have to fiddle around downloading / tagging them, hence the request for them to be default. I want to spend my time actively studying.

Actually, the reason we don't have it is just that we haven't built it yet. It's totally on the list and shouldn't be that hard. We'll have users submit pictures as part of their custom definitions, have the server eat and reformat them for performance, and just ask people not to upload copyrighted images (and not accept as standard any that do get uploaded). Then maybe we add an option to turn off images if enough people don't like them.

But yeah, I think it'll be a lot of fun, and should add some zazz, which helps with memory.

Hi Nick.

What if the user wants to submit photos that they have taken and wants to retain the copyright? Couldn't you allow for the possibility that users submit images and allow Skritter usage under licence?

The only reason I say this is that taking photos that are suitable for vocabulary learning is quite time consuming (having done this for my own purposes). Plus... the security guards are not always very happy. I don't think that I would want to just give them away.

How about allowing users to offer their own image packs which Skritter users could subscribe for? This might ensure better quality images and help to encourage contributors. You could have some kind of profit share with the contributors.

Just a thought.

GaryM, selling image packs sounds like more trouble than it's worth on our end, but as far as the uploader retaining copyright: sure, I don't think we'd need to do anything differently in that use case, if the images would just be used within Skritter.