News about Miniatures

The year is coming to an end and it's time to sum up some results. Our year began with a difficult move to new servers, as the old ones could no longer cope physically. Of course, because we have more than 1 million images for sets, it's not easy to store and save them. We have successfully completed the move and we even have some space for interesting future updates on the site. Thanks to the new servers, we have additional capacities, some of which were aimed at creating a search for images of sets. So far, it's working with our telegram bot - you send him a picture, and it searches for similar among the million available ones. Well, if the bot fails, professionals are involved, so everything will be found. And we've been searching the collection a lot. I mean a lot! From more than 1.5k searches only a small faction weren't successful. That's been a peculiar experience. The company's pages have been updated, statistics, games, and other amenities have been added, both for users and archivists. Things are constantly changing and being fixed on the site - many collectors offer small but extremely useful features that are added fairly quickly. With such a large amount of information on the site, it is very important to be able to filter and sort it correctly, finding errors and omissions. Therefore, a lot of things have been added for the convenience of archivists. It may not be accessible to ordinary visitors, but in the end, all this affects the correctness and completeness of the information, which means that in the end it is important for everyone. A lot of interesting things on the site are in beta and are being actively tested (you can offer your ideas and participation here), but we managed to release Releases before the holidays. A Release is a couple of sets from one particular company combined due to a similar release window. Sometimes it's easier to see a list of the latest releases from different companies than to scroll through the pages of new sets. In addition, it turned out that more than 700 releases from different companies are released per month - who would have thought until we started developing this feature! Therefore, viewing the sets by release simplifies the review of new products - it is worth skipping a couple of weeks and it will be difficult to scroll up all sets. Releases can be viewed on the company's pages and in a separate section. Releases are part of a significant future update of the catalog, as with such volumes of new and old information, more flexible approaches are needed. YouTube also showed a list of the last uploaded videos, if anyone remembers :) But for such major changes, we will also need to learn how to work with information more precisely, so that it improves the use of the catalog and does not confuse. This year, we added a new image description layer and sorted more than 12k sets from GW, which is almost 100 thousand photos. Now we can easily find sets that lack a photo of the package, for example. This means that it will be easier for everyone to add the missing information! Over 91k sets have been added this year and the total number of sets has exceeded 318k. Collectors have manually added more than 5k sets and made more than 91k corrections to information in existing sets. This is, by the way, one improvement in information every 5 minutes, if we count the whole year. This is a lot, significantly more than in previous years. Unthinkable numbers for our community, who would have thought of such a thing 10 years ago. With time we'll reach the bottom of the barrel of old sets we can add. So we'll focus on the new sets and improving the quality of information we collect and store, as well as adding more complicated categories of miniatures. For instance, minis from previous centuries, flat miniatures and other rarities. We have tons of entertaining information ahead of us! It's been an active year! We managed to do so much, and it seems that we didn't manage to do even more :) Congratulations to all the collectors and members of our community. May next year be even richer in discoveries and pleasant events! There is a lot of information, updates and useful tools ahead of us, so see you in the new year! P.S. Join the congratulations in the comments, let's congratulate each other!

It's been quite an eventful six months! There were a lot of things added, changed and improved on the site, but there was no time to write about all the updates. So now it's time to tell you all about it. Perhaps the main changes have been made to the ‘Companies’ section on the site. It received the new main page with a list of all companies, we’ve made it easier to read and added more information. The breakdown by type of company activity has been corrected - now you can separately see art studios, casting companies, shops and others. General statistics among all companies have been added. There is not much there yet, but you can add anything you want - suggest your options. The pages of each company have been drastically updated. We’ve added Tabs to logically breakdown all the piles of information there. Now there are separate tabs for company Statistics, News, Articles and Discussions, as well as convenient tabs for archivists and users with extended rights. The company's games tab has been significantly updated - now there is a convenient breakdown into Games and lines / series, with the main and most popular games highlighted. What we have especially longed for is the possibility of a quick visual search by miniatures of a particular company! Games are now divided into individual games and game sets, because not every company releases miniatures for a specific game. Sometimes miniatures are just part of a certain line, grouped by scale, setting, and no other definite conditions. Games now use more precise dates that include years, months and days. This will allow dates to be stored and understood more correctly. This same system will be implemented in all other dates on the site. There's also a lot of new stuff in Sets. 360 ° rotation for models has returned (but for now this feature is only available to users with advanced permissions). New fields have been added to link sets - ‘is included in this set’ and ‘is part of a set’. This will allow for more precise relationships between different sets, for example between collections of sets or individual miniatures that are only available in the full set. Additionally - over 8K bugs in set id have been found and fixed. We have already written about a new set of categories - picture types. Our community has already marked up more than half of the GW sets, which is almost 12,000! This marking will help to easily identify which kits are missing certain visual information, for example, no photo of sprues or the back of the packaging. And it will be much easier to find what you need on eBay and add it to the database. We have grown up in design, we have increased the maximum size to standard 13-inch screens. Yes, there are people who open the browser window to the full 27-inch screen size, but please let us take care of your neck. It will no longer hurt after viewing our site! Now the information may not be so tightly packed on the page and the site will be easier to use. Yes, all Loot Studios sets and their miniatures have been added to the site, and the process of adding new ones has been fine-tuned. The only thing left to do is to transfer all the information found about the authors and creators, but we will do that gradually. There's a lot more to come, such as a universal miniature size comparison system, a redesign of the Games, Factions and Miniatures catalogue pages. The return of eBay, Kickstarter, Patreon integration and much more. We will gradually make the site even more user-friendly, not forgetting to constantly add new miniatures and supplement information about old ones. While writing this news we have passed the figure of 300.000 sets on the site. Not miniatures – sets! And there are probably close to a million miniatures within them already! I wonder if we can already call our community the biggest in terms of sets or miniatures?! We are not after quantity. We are more interested in quality. But we can't stop adding new sets to the site either - if we miss the opportunity now, it will take us a long time to catch up. I would like to thank all the active participants of our community. Thanks to them, their involvement and ideas the site is growing and developing!