Cinema Treasures

  • June 3, 2011

    Suwanti delivers the 2,000th Photo!

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    Thanks to everyone for pushing us over a nice, first week milestone.

    Suwanti’s photo of the MCL Telford Cinema in Hong Kong is our 2,000th photo added to the site since we relaunched less than six days ago.

    Looking forward already to 2,500…

    Check out our growing photo galleries»

  • Which photo will be #2000?

    We’re currently 19 photos away from 2000. That’s more than 1600 photos posted since Saturday! The 2,000th photo gets a blog entry and a shout out on our home page.

  • June 2, 2011

    Scheduled maintenance on Friday morning

    Cinema Treasures will be undergoing some scheduled maintenance around 12:00am Pacific Time on Friday morning.

    During this maintenance, the site will be online and available. However, for a period of up to thirty minutes, some theaters may appear to be missing from our theater guide as we reindex our theater database.

    If you can’t find the theater you need, just be patient and wait a few minutes until it returns. The site should resume working normally no later than 12:30am Pacific Time.

    For future status updates, please follow our Twitter account.

    Thanks for your understanding!

  • How to make links with our new comment system

    Many people have asked us how to add links to their comments.

    For now, if you paste a link into a comment, it will not become clickable after you submit your comment. While we do not yet support auto-linking links in comments, we hope to add support for that very soon.

    In the meantime, if you still need to link to a movie theater or some other page, just use the Markdown link syntax for your links.

    Here’s an example:

    [Cinema Treasures](http://cinematreasures.org)

    Once submitted, the resulting link will look like this:

    Cinema Treasures

    (Note: the old version of Cinema Treasures used so-called “BBCode”-style syntax for links, but this is not the same as Markdown link syntax. So please make sure you don’t use the old style.)

  • June 1, 2011

    We’ve added over 1,500 movie theater photos

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    You guys are amazing! Since launching our new website with photo gallery support, you have uploaded over 1,500 photos to Cinema Treasures.

    Overnight, the photos section of Cinema Treasures has become one of the most exciting parts of the site. Whether you’re a historian looking for vintage images, an architect looking for inspiration, a theater manager or marketer interested in bringing in patrons, or a theater fan looking for theaters to visit, the galleries have already borne tremendous fruit.

    That’s way more photos than we expected less than four days later, but since you’ve been asking us to add photo galleries for a very long time, we totally understand.

    What can you do with our photo galleries?

    We’ve been getting a lot of questions about our photo galleries, so here’s a quick description of what our galleries can do and answers to some common questions.

    • Upload your favorite movie theater images. There’s no limit to uploads, so you can add as many photos as you like. Over time, we expect to have dozens of images for theaters like Grauman’s Chinese, the Grand Lake, the AMC Empire 25, and many others.

    • Browse and search through all of the photos on Cinema Treasures. To see the photos of a specific theater, you click on the Photos tab just under the theater’s name and address.

    • Favorite your favorite photos (and theaters) by clicking the heart on the bottom of the photo. And to see your favorites, just go to your member profile page and click on the favorite photos link.

    • When uploading a photo, you can pick the license for that photo. We currently support several types of licenses: copyrighted, public domain, and a number of Creative Commons based licenses.

    • If your photo was shot on an iPhone or Android device and you upload the original photo, we’ll show a map of where the photo was taken.

    How do we pick the default image for a movie theater?

    We pick the most popular photograph for each theater and that becomes the default image. Popularity is calculated by the number of photo views for each theater, and we update the default image every day based on any changes in popularity. (We also reserve the right to pick the default image ourselves if we have a favorite.)

    What else are we working on?

    • Due to your feedback, we’ll be adding the ability to remove photos you’ve uploaded later today. We hope to eventually support rotating photos, but for now you must rotate your photos manually if necessary.

    • New and better ways to browse all the new photos people are uploading.

    We need your help!

    While we’ve made huge progress in the past few days, there are still thousands of theaters that don’t have a photo yet. If you haven’t uploaded any photos of your favorite theaters yet, please take a moment to upload them.

    (Thanks to Ken Roe for his gorgeous photo of the Grand Lake in Oakland.)

  • May 28, 2011

    Cinema Treasures relaunches with new design, photo galleries, and more!

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    We are enormously excited to bring you the new Cinema Treasures website.

    The new site features a brand new logo, revamped site design, upgraded theater browsing and searching (with Google maps, street views, and neighborhoods), photo galleries, and videos.

    For starters, we’ve completely redesigned our theater guide. Browsing theaters has never been easier (or more fun). Our theater pages now have integrated Google maps, so for the first time you can see where theaters are located and whether they are open or closed. Open theaters have green map markers and closed theaters have red markers. Even better, you can quickly see how many theaters in a given area are renovating, restoring, demolished, etc.

    Cinema Treasures has already become the world’s most comprehensive website dedicated to movie theaters with over 31,000 theaters from over 180 countries. With our new photo galleries, we also hope to build the world’s largest and most detailed theater photo archive.

    Adding photos is easy and highly addictive. Find a theater, click on the photos tab, and then upload your images. Once you’ve begun adding photos to the site, you can share the link to all of your photos with friends. You can also “favorite” theaters and photos to bump up their rankings on Cinema Treasures.

    We’ve also added Google street views for thousands of theaters, so even if we don’t have a current photo of a movie theater, you can see what it looks like. Even better, if the default street view isn’t pointing in the right direction, you can rotate the view until you find the best view of the theater and then save the changes.

    With our new video section, you can also now find policy trailers, theater advertisements, documentaries, and other material from YouTube and Vimeo and upload new videos through the site.

    Finally, Cinema Treasures has also created a new YouTube Channel, a dedicated Facebook page, and, most actively, a Twitter feed that is updated throughout the day with news about moviegoing and movie theaters. We’ve also redesigned and refocused our blog to provide more useful and current information about movie theaters, the exhibition industry, and the moviegoing experience.

    We’re excited to bring all of this to you just in time for the summer movie season. So get out of the house, go to the movies, and take some photos while you’re there!

    Next week, we’ll be taking some time to highlight all of the new features. But for now, enjoy kicking the tires! :)

    Cheers,

    Patrick, Ross, Ken, and Michael
    Cinema Treasures

  • Updating your password

    To use the new Cinema Treasures, you need to first update your account password.

    Here are the steps you should take:

    • Go to the Reset your password page.
    • Enter your email address or username.
    • Check your email for an email from us.
    • Click the link in the email we sent you.
    • Enter your new password twice and save.

    If you can’t remember your email address or the email address we have on file for you is possibly out of date, then we recommend emailing for help.

  • May 24, 2011

    Comments Back Online

    While we straighten out this technical snafu, we are restoring comments on the “old” (current) site. All of these comments will be imported into the new site so post away! Adding theaters, though, is still disabled as we need to maintain one theater database…

    Thanks for your continued patience. We’re working as fast as we can …

  • May 23, 2011

    New Cinema Treasures Site Update

    Hey, everyone.

    Due to a very last minute and annoying technical problem, we are unable to launch the new site today.

    It’s especially frustrating since we’ve spent hundreds of hours working on the new site and making it as bug-free as possible. This last issue, though, appeared just this morning and it’s a show stopper.

    Since this issue is still unresolved, we had to delay our launch for today. Once we’re able to find a solution to this problem, we’ll post another update with a revised launch schedule.

    Until then, thanks for your patience. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on.

    More soon …

    Ross & Patrick

  • May 19, 2011

    Cinema Treasures Site Update

    Hello Everyone —

    Just a quick update to let you know that we are close to relaunching the site. Look for it this weekend or Monday at the latest. All of the current site’s content (theaters, blog posts, comments, etc.) has now been migrated to the new site and we’re kicking its tires, updating this and that, and getting ready for Cinema Treasures 3.0.

    Thanks for your enthusiasm and your patience!

    — Ross, Patrick, Ken, and Michael