How can we encourage users to include images?

Question

Especially in terms of gardening Q&A, a picture is worth a thousand words. Naturally, questions tagged identification will provide at least one image. But others don’t.

How can we encourage askers and responders to include pictures in their posts?

Most questions—and the likelihood of them being answered—would definitely benefit from photographic information provided through pictures.

Be it the view of the garden, as clarification of a description or to show how a plant is situated: a photo is easily provided and included in the post.

In a question of mine, I even used some public domain photograph of the plant in question (for people who know the plant but not its name).

It’s also pleasing the eye and improves quality for future readers.

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Don’t get me wrong: there’s quite a number of illustrated questions. But sometimes people probably don’t think of this option and its benefits. For starters (i.e. without much effect), we could add a hint in the “How to Ask/Format” boxes on the “Ask Question” page.

Lest I forget, here’s an image of a mockup, linking to markdown help on images:

There’s plenty of other means, like actively hinting the user when a post doesn’t include an image-link or introducing badges for illustrating posts.

Answer 1

There should be an option to customize the gardening se so that you need to have xx number of points before you can post without an image.

I think that should solve most of the problems with new users not knowing how to upload images.

Answer 2

Dakab, I agree with everything you said. I wish we had power to add/change more things in the Help Center or someplace, so people would know that pictures should be an expected part of asking a question. It's made clear in the excerpt of the identification tag. The diagnosis and diseases tags have instructions in the body. These are positive things, but not everybody reads tag descriptions.

I also think the system should make posting pictures easier to do, as a lot of people want to, but don't know how. Unfortunately, that seems to be out of our hands. Certainly when we ask new users to post pictures, we should be prepared to help them do so. I think in general we, especially @Niall C., do a good job of that. Bringing a new user's photos down from an offsite service is good too, and a number of experienced users are doing that, but it can be a lot of work.

If I properly understand the privileges page in the Help Center, new users can't post more than two pictures, or links to anything, until they have 10 rep. If that's the case, perhaps we should think a bit about upvoting a questions that looks fine but is waiting for pictures, as is encouraged in this discussion here on our meta.

In many cases, pictures will help people decide whether or not to upvote the question, so it's a Catch-22, but if we need more than two pictures to diagnose or advise, supporting the question enough for people to be able to post them would be helpful. It has been suggested that we ask people to swap pictures in and out during that early phase, but I see that as confusing to the OP and the viewers who may have seen the question before some of the pictures started disappearing.

Leading by example is another way to encourage people to post pictures. Some users, like you, are doing that already. As you said, even a public domain picture is great, and often easy to find. I also post pictures where they may not be necessary to receive a good answer. For example, I added the pictures of my daylilies to this question after it already had two great answers. There are a lot of references to plants on the site that I haven't seen before. Perhaps some people don't know what a daylily is, and don't want to follow the informational link in the text, so hopefully the pictures were helpful. Mostly I did it so people might follow suit.

Answer 3

In my experience of the site - and I've been here since the beginning - questions posted without images will quickly attract comments e.g. "please post an image". And that's fine. It's usually said reasonably politely.

And mostly the OP will oblige. In fact, everyone's happy in such cases, as answerers do like to see the OP return and answer questions and add any missing information. Don't forget that images aren't the only vital detail which can be missed off an initial question. Sometimes location is missing even though it's essential.

In cases where the OP fails to return with a pic and the question remains catastrophically unanswerable without it, the question can be voted down and eventually removed.

Answer 4

Pose a question of if your question needs any images to aid in the advice provided, and if so require they upload images before posting it, but allow someone to put it in a holding pattern until they can get the photos.