Photos & public restoration pages

Build a photo record of the fleet, and publish an opt-in restoration page for supporters.

The photo gallery

Every locomotive and every car has a Photos section on its detail page. Photos are part of the maintenance record, not decoration — a picture of a cracked staybolt or a sheet before and after a repair is often the clearest evidence you have.

To add photos, use Add photos and Upload. JPEG, PNG, and GIF are accepted, up to 8 MB each, and you can select several at once.

Each photo carries:

A caption — what the picture shows.
The date it was taken — read automatically from the camera data where it exists, and editable when it is wrong or missing.
An optional link to an inspection, which attaches the photo to that record as visual evidence.

Sort the gallery by Recently added, Newest taken, or Oldest taken. Newest taken and Oldest taken are the useful ones for following a restoration, since upload order rarely matches the order work actually happened in.

Promote any photo to the cover image to make it the machine's profile picture on the roster and elsewhere in the app.

Uploaded images are resized and re-encoded on the way in. That strips the embedded camera metadata, including GPS location, so a photo taken on a phone does not carry your shop's coordinates with it.

Public restoration pages

A public restoration page is an opt-in page anyone can visit — no account, no sign-in — showing progress on a single locomotive. It is meant for supporters, donors, and railfans, and it is off by default.

Publishing is an administrator action, done from the Public page panel on the locomotive's detail page:

Address — the short name the page is served under, giving a URL of the form railcompliant.com/p/your-name.
Blurb — the description that heads the page.
Show volunteer hours (total only) — whether to show the hours figure at all.
Show recent photos — whether the gallery appears.
Goal $ and Raised $ — fill both to show a progress bar.
Donate link — must be an https address.

Click Publish. The panel then shows the page as on, and the same controls let you edit the settings or unpublish, which takes the page down immediately.

What a public page will and will not show

The privacy rules are enforced by the app rather than left to whoever configures the page:

Volunteer hours appear only as a single total for the locomotive. Per-person hours are never shown, and no volunteer is named.
No compliance status, inspection detail, due date, or defect appears. A public page cannot be used to work out whether an engine is behind on its inspections.
No crew names, work order detail, or cost figures are reachable.
Only photos from that locomotive's gallery are shown, and only if you turned photos on.

Public pages are marked so search engines do not index them, and they are cached briefly, so an edit may take a few minutes to appear for someone who has just loaded the page.

Aggregate volunteer hours come from the same labor records as the grant reporting described in Labor and volunteer hours. To change what a page shows, edit the settings on the locomotive it belongs to.