This site has been up 15 years, and this site has not kept up with the time. Today that changes, this much needed updated has been in development for many months. Read further for some of the highlighted changes and future plans.

Flights Page

The flights pages currently limited to core functionality: showing expected arrivals and departures for Schiphol and Rotterdam. ADSB based runway detection and aircraft photos have been added. In a future update I plan to reintroduce some of functionality from the classic Schiphol Flights Page page, such as group by, filters and dual runway usage times highlight. For the time being the classic page will remain online and updated.

Photo Album

The photo album sees some of the greatest improvements:

Upload

Photographers will be pleased that you can now upload multiple photos at once. Aircraft and location information can be entered quickly using autocomplete.

Licenses

Also new is the introduction of photo licenses. Next to a Full Copyright (all rights reserved) you can now also choose to publish your photos under a Creative Commons License. Such a license allows people to use your photos with certain restriction. For example, a Attribution-NoDerivatives will allow people and commercial organisations to share, copy and redistribute your photo. This under the condition they provided give appropriate credit (Attribution) and they don't make any kind of transformation, edit or further build upon they photo (NoDerivatives).

Screening

The new update introduces a proper photo screening system. The previous system was lacking in two main ways: if photos were rejected, it provided no way to give feedback to the photographer. Over the years I've had a number of people offer their time to help with screening, which I'm very thankful for. However the previous system did not allow multiple screeners to process the queue. This major update addresses both of these issues. The Screening Queue page photographers will be able to view feedback provided for rejected photos. And for screening system now assigns photos to individual screeners. Once things are settled with this update I'll be asking for volunteers to help with screening.

Photo Resolution

It's 2020 and I don't know anyone who has a computer with a 1024x768 pixels screen, even most smartphones have a higher resolution. However when this site started some 15 years ago, that was a very common screen resolution for computers to have. Applying the same logic to today's technology, photo's will be resized down to a maximum edge of 1920 pixels, with lower steps at 1600, 1200, 1024, 640 pixels.

Data Quality

Although I've done my best to keep the aircraft database as clean as possible, some issues have come up over the years. This update includes a tool to help identifier such data quality issues. At the moment it has 1319 identified potential issues. These are problems such as capitalization differences (e.g. EasyJet, Easyjet, easyJet, easyjet), airline and aircraft type fields getting mixed up ('Emirates' is not an aircraft type and 'Airbus A380' is not an airline). Most of the issues identified are under under the category "registration with multiple airline / aircraft types". A lot of these can be merged, but not all. For example, many of the Northwest / Delta A330's popup on under this category, but these aircraft genuinely have had two lives under the same number. On the other hand 'EL AL' and 'El Al Israel Airlines' really are the same aircraft. Over the next few months I'll work through this list cleaning it up bit by bit.

Missing in Action & Future Plans

Not everything as made it to the new system.

Forum

With only a few posts per year, I did not find it worthwhile to create a forum or something similar in the new system. That said, I am aware that the new sites laks possibilities for interaction between members. In a future update I plan to introduce blog and blog comments and ❤'s. If there are keen writers out there, I may open the this blog to guest writers.

Photo Albums

Although the photo database allows you to group photos by aircraft characteristics. Sometimes you want a little more (I know I do), like bundling all photos from a trip or to make a collection of retro aircraft. Photo Albums will allow you to do this.

Photo Usage Requests

Over the years I've forwarded a number of requests from companies and media organisations who are interested in using members photos. In the future plan to create a something like a private messaging system by which I should no longer need to be an intermediary.

Aircraft Spotters Log

There's an largly unknown feature of the classic Schiphol Flights Page. If you've uploaded photos of more than 200 aircraft registrations, new aircraft registrations will be highlighted. I hope to re-introduce this in the new system, but not just for photographers - a log book will allow the binocular and notebook spotters to make use of this feature as well.

Flights Page

Apart from current functionality in the classic Schiphol Flights Page, I have some ideas for further enhance the data. For example I plane to runway information extracted from ACARS clearance messages. And verify airport provided aircraft with ADSB.

Dutch

Deze site was toch in het Nederlands, waarom is nu alles in het engels? Idee is om het tweetalig te maken. Voor nu is alles in het Engels omdat ik dat makkelijker vind met programmeren.

A lot of changes in one go. If you have any comments or questions, you can contact me via e-mail at daniel@dutchplanespotters.nl, or via Twitter @avgeeklucky