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Photos & public restoration pages

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

Every locomotive and every car has a Photos tab on its record 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, choose them under Add photos and click Upload.

  • JPEG, PNG, or GIF, up to 25 MB each — ordinary phone photos are fine.
  • Up to 24 photos at a time, and up to 64 MB in one upload; for a bigger set, upload in groups.
  • Photos over 40 megapixels are turned away; use the camera's standard photo size.

The form checks sizes before anything is sent, names any file that is too large, and shows Uploading… while a large batch goes up. When it finishes, a note says exactly what happened — for example "Added 2 photos. 1 skipped: larger than 25 MB." — so a photo is never silently dropped.

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 (locomotives only), 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.

The cover photo

The cover is the machine's profile picture on its record page and elsewhere in the app. The first photo you upload becomes the cover automatically; use Set cover on any other photo to change it. If you delete the cover, the newest remaining photo takes its place.

Every photo is scanned for viruses before it is saved, then resized (to 1,280 pixels on the longest side) and re-encoded on the way in. The re-encode strips the embedded camera metadata, including GPS location, so a photo taken on a phone does not carry your shop's coordinates with it. A photo the scanner refuses is named in the message above the gallery and is not stored. See How your data is protected.

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 right of the locomotive's record page (click its heading to unfold it):

  • 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. These are figures you type; RailCompliant does not count donations.
  • Donate link — your railroad's own donation page (PayPal, a fundraising site, your website). It must be an https address. The public page shows a Support the work button that opens it. RailCompliant never handles the money.

Click Publish. The panel then shows the page as live with a link to view it, and the same controls let you update 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.

A published page is genuinely public: anyone with the address can open it and share it, and a search engine can find it if it is linked from somewhere else. Pages are cached briefly, so an edit may take a few minutes to appear for someone who has just loaded the page. Visits are counted in RailCompliant's own site statistics without cookies and without keeping visitors' addresses; see How your data is protected.

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.

Last updated October 4, 2026