New Features: Readers' Photos

I teased on Sunday that there were a few new features in the works, and tonight I get the chance to let you help a fun one: Readers’ Photos. A lot of you take great photos of Downtown, and we’d like to see some of them here on the site.

On stories that have Readers’ Photos enabled, you’ll be able to paste the URL of your flickr photo into an easy form to add your shot to the story. Photos show up as thumbnails, and when you click them you’ll see a larger version and any caption that the contributor added.

Not every story will have the feature enabled. Which ones do and which don’t is something we’ll be looking to figure out, but primarily our idea is to enable Readers’ Photos on event recaps and special photo themed posts.

In order to post a photo, you’ll need to register a user account. That’s a one-time thing, and has some other advantages. Most importantly, it’ll let the site remember who you are when you go to comment, automatically filling in your name and other information. Soon it’ll also give you a better ability to keep track of the conversation on stories you’ve commented on.

Readers’ Photos are enabled for this story, so go ahead and give it a shot. Let us see your favorite Downtown photos. I’m posted up a couple just to give you a start. Feel free to post any thoughts about how the feature works in the comments. Consider this post a beta test, with a true launch to come real soon.

Also, remember that you can always add shots to the blogdowntown flickr pool, which feeds the cube of photos over there in the site’s right sidebar.