Image Restoration Progress

We are making excellent progress with our image restoration progress. Of the 71,406 N Scale items, we now have photographs of all but 13,500. Of those, 10K were images that were lost due to the server crash and 3,500 are items which never had images in the first place. This is pretty good, because immediately after the server was rebuilt, we only had about 10K items with images (which means 61,406 items had no images at all!).

I am not very pleased with the fact that our server went down in the first place with no explanation at all from the ISP. Nor am I pleased with the premium backup service I paid for which was never correctly installed and hence the damage. And I have nothing good to say about their customer support.

On the plus side, using Amazon Web Services for image storage has been nothing but pleasant. Their customer support is simply amazing and the product has features we have not yet begun to tap. You can be sure that if you upload an image into TroveStar now, that that image will be properly taken care of.

We still can use a lot of help though. As I stated above, about 14K items still need images. Please, if you own something that lacks an image, take a picture and upload it. Be sure to give yourself credit by adding something to the first image caption notes such as "Image Courtesy of Arthur Smith". That way you can earn credit towards free stuff from the Appin House classified seller. Every three photos earns you a buck which you can use to buy trains. Just line up a bunch of your stuff on your kitchen table, snap a picture and upload it using the 'edit item' option. We already have a number of folks turning in their photo credits for free rare and collectible items available nowhere else (not even eBay!).

Thanks to everyone who has lent a hand. Thanks to the NSE for providing a HUGE database of images and please keep up the good work. We are in the home stretch.