Refactoring the open-source photography community

Generally speaking, most free-software communities tend to form around specific projects: a distribution, an application, a tightly linked suite of applications, and so on. Those are the functional units in which developers work, so it is a natural extension from there to focused mailing lists, web sites, IRC channels, and other forms of interaction with each other and users. But there are alternatives. At Libre Graphics Meeting 2016 in London, Pat David spoke about his recent experience bringing together a new online community centered around photographers who use open-source software. That community crosses over between several applications and libraries, and it has been successful enough that multiple photography-related projects have shut down their independent user forums and migrated to the new site, PIXLS.US.

The impetus for the project, David said, was his annoyance with bad photography tutorials—specifically those for open-source applications. Bad tutorials exist for proprietary software, too, but they are disproportionately common for open-source programs. The majority of the photography tutorials for applications like GIMP, he said, address only "really basic" functions like "how to apply an unsharp mask." Worse still, they have a tendency to be overly "monetized" in the advertising sense, "giving you ten pages of four lines each filled with as many ads as they can fit on the screen."

While that would be irritating for any reader, it particularly bothered David because, as a serious "semi-professional" photographer, he knew how capable GIMP and other open-source applications are for real photographic work, but it seemed like that word was not getting out. The high-quality photography tutorials were "pretty much proprietary-only," and at online photographer user communities like Luminous Landscape or DPReview, open-source software is a subject non grata. "If they talk about it at all, it's just in passing or else it's somebody telling me GIMP can't handle high bit-depths."

Then, one day in 2011, everything changed when a discussion about a particularly exotic image came up on a GIMP discussion forum. The presiding opinion was that it was probably too complicated to reproduce with GIMP. David chimed in and said "no, that's easy to do in GIMP," to which someone else replied: "Okay; so show me." Though initially taken aback, David took the challenge seriously and, four months later, came back with a detailed tutorial. The author of the "show me" comment turned out to be Alexandre Prokoudine, himself a photographer and a GIMP contributor.

David then spent a few years writing photo tutorials on his personal blog but, by 2014, he decided that a dedicated community site was still missing. While there are several good GIMP user sites and blogs (he highlighted Meet the GIMP and GIMP Chat as examples), they focus on GIMP in general, rather than photography. When the majority of a forum's discussions are about "making chat-room avatars," he said, one cannot build a community of photographers.

Thus, PIXLS.US was born. David planned the site to have two halves: a collection of articles and blog posts on one side, plus a discussion forum on the other. He developed the article side (with the help of Marcus Rückert) using the static-site generator Metalsmith, in order to best support a (hopefully) high traffic load for image-heavy pages.

For the forum side, he spent time evaluating the options, and was displeased with most of them. Most open-source options are self-hosted (like phpBB) and require users to create yet another username and password—which only increases the "friction" of getting involved in the site. "We know comments on the Internet suck," he said, and, for their solution, more and more sites seemed to be trending toward embedding page widgets from the proprietary discussion service Disqus. But that was a non-starter. "Do you really want to do that to your users?" he asked, "have them tracked by Disqus?"

Eventually, he settled on Discourse, the open-source, embeddable discussion framework started by Jeff Atwood and Robin Ward. It runs on a Digital Ocean droplet that costs David a few dollars a month, but it supports dedicated discussion threads as well as threads attached to posts on the article side, serving as post comments. Moreover, it allows users to log in through any of a number of OAuth2-capable web services if the user chooses (such as Facebook or Google), but permits email-based account creation, too.

The site launched in April 2015 and has grown to 475 active users thus far. But, while the site started out as a photographer's discussion forum, in July 2015 the G'MIC project decided to move its official discussion forum from its own site to PIXLS.US. Then in October, the RawTherapee project followed suit. The PhotoFlow project became the third to join in January 2016, providing the biggest jump in numbers the site has seen to date. At the same time, the number of tutorial contributors has continued to grow as well.

Having users from all three projects share a common discussion site solves the "separate forum" problem, David said. Users make use of multiple applications in their workflow, so it is an easy step from there to discussing workflows and techniques in a single place. Even better, he said, the "cross-pollination" effect has already had a noticeable impact on two new projects. Carlo Vaccari's Filmulator started out as a stand-alone utility, but after soliciting input from PIXLS.US users, Vaccari was persuaded to re-implement it as a plugin for darktable. And Damon Lynch got valuable early design feedback from PIXLS.US discussions when he launched Rapid Photo Downloader.

Moving forward, David said his emphasis for now is on writing more content for the article side. "There is a trade-off between frequency and quality, and my tendency has been to err on the side of quality." Nevertheless, he said that PIXLS.US would be happy to have other projects join the discussion-side of the site.

In response to an audience question, David said that the only step he took to lure existing projects over to the PIXLS.US forum was to make the offer to the development team and see if they replied. For some users, he said, the process of moving to a different site was painful, since the normal "migration" involved the development team announcing the transition and locking the old discussion forum. But that is part of why he made an effort to provide multiple, low-friction ways to create an account at the new forum.

Another audience member asked what the comment-moderation experience has been like. Thus far, David said, the community has had very little trouble with disruptive posters or trolls. Discourse includes a robust set of built-in reputation and moderation features, and so far, no one who works on the forum has had any need to intervene personally. "But who knows," he said, "if some of the GIMP forums were to migrate over, we might have a different story, given how wild and polarizing they can be. But so far, it's been great."

David's posts on the article side of the site are, indeed, in-depth and focus on high-quality image work like one would see on any other dedicated photography site. He has written about luminosity masks, wavelet decomposition, and color-curve matching, just to name a few; topics the casual GIMP user may never had heard of. But it is hard to argue with the results—as many other open-source projects would no doubt agree, having a skilled set of users to write tutorials can reap large benefits.

That said, there may be lessons worth learning from the discussion-forum side as well. Intentionally creating an online community based around a type of user, rather than a specific application or a Linux distribution, is rare. But cross-pollination is a facet of most (if not all) disciplines, and it hard to imagine that there are no other communities that could find similar benefits from consolidating their discussions in one place rather than dividing them up on a project-by-project basis. For everyone not grappling with such philosophical ideas, though, PIXLS.US continues to work on its own terms: demonstrating that high-end photographic work is right at home with open-source software.

[The author would like to thank Libre Graphics Meeting for travel assistance to London for LGM 2016.]