User Guide

On the home page, you will find a button that says "Add Photo" under the "Contribute" section. You can also click the "Add Photo" link provided in the top navigation bar. This will take you to the "Add Photo" page, where you can provide the front and back view of the photo, along with the source and owner of the photo.

You can upload photos of soldiers and civilians, as long as they are from the Civil War era. We also allow pre- and post-war photos of Civil War veterans.

Photos must have a front view, but may or may not have a back view. If a back view is available, we advise uploading it as well.

Currently the face detection algorithm only detects one face per photograph, but we hope to support group portraits in the near future. Meanwhile, you are welcome to crop the faces in your photo and add them to the site individually.

Else, if the algorithm detects multiple faces, you can select the one you want to identify. For identifying the other face(s), you can re-upload the photo and select a different face.

You may see this error if the face detection algorithm is unable to detect the face in the photo. This may happen due to low resolution of the photo, extreme camera angles (for example, a side view), lighting (too dark or too bright) or objects covering part of the face (occlusion).

Currently, we do not support the identification of such photos. You can still access these photos under the dashboard or your profile, but won’t be able to do anything beyond viewing these. You will find them with the title -- "No face detected". These photos will not show up in the search results.

If you find a high-quality version of the photo, you can try uploading that. In the future, we plan on extending support for these photos.

Update: you can now try to re-detect the face in the photo by clicking the "Detect Face Manually" button in the photo page. The face detection algorithm will try to re-detect the face. If it fails, you can manually try to select the face using a cropping tool. Facial recognition technology will still not work for these cases, but the software will try to use a different technology to find similar photos. The results retrieved for these photos will not be as accurate as facial recognition.

While uploading the photo, you must add the source of the photo in the "Image Source" field. Here, the source of the photo means where you found the digital copy of the photo (e.g. your collection, a book, a website, etc.)

In addition to photo source information, you can also add photo metadata information in the next step. Learn more about that here.

The source of the photo cannot be modified later, but you can edit the photo metadata information.

1. Go to the Photo Page.
2. Click the "Edit Details" button on top-right. This will bring up the form where you can edit the photo metadata.

You can find all your photos on the home page as well as your user profile page.

1. Dashboard (Home Page)
On the Home Page, you can find all your photos under the "Added by You" section in the form of an image gallery of five photos at a time, with the most recent ones on Page 1. Clicking the page numbers below will display a different set of photos in the gallery.



2. Profile Page
You can access your user profile page from any page on the website by selecting the "Logged in as your name/username" dropdown menu on the top navigation bar and clicking "View Profile".



On your user profile page, you can find all your photos under the "Your Photos" section in the form of an image galler of 10 photos at a time, with the most recent ones on Page 1. Clicking the page numbers below will display a different set of photos in the gallery.

Your photos can be viewed by everyone on the website, and similarly, you can also view photos uploaded by other users. By allowing all photos to be public across the website, the community can expand their knowledge of Civil War soldiers. The community can also add missing information or modify incorrect information for any photo. You always get credit for any action performed on any photo page. Further, these photos can also potentially help identify other unknown photos.

Since all photos on the website are public, you can browse photos uploaded by other users in many different ways. If you come across a photo link on any page, you can simply click the link and it will take you that particular photo page.

If you know the username of a particular user, you can go their user profile page by going to this URL: https://photosleuth-beta.herokuapp.com/user/username/, where you replace username in the URL by the actual username. On their user profile page, you can find all the photos in an image gallery.

If you know the photo ID number of a particular photo, you can go to the photo profile page by going to this URL: https://photosleuth-beta.herokuapp.com/photos/view/photo ID number/, where you replace photo ID number in the URL by the actual photo ID number.

You can only delete photos that have been uploaded by you. Apart from you, only the admin can delete your photo.

You can delete a photo in two different ways.

1. From the Home Page Dashboard/User Profile Page
In the image gallery that shows all your photographs, you can see a "X" button on the top-right corner of each photograph. Clicking this button will bring up a confirmation dialog box to delete the photo.



2. From the Photo Page
The "Delete Photo" button will appear next to the "Edit Details" button on the "Details" section of the photo page. Clicking this button will bring up a confirmation dialog box to delete the photo.