NYTimes.com depicts recession using citizen journalist upload system

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The New York Times' latest user-generated photo interactive launched today, using

images which depict the recession .

User-generated content for 'Picturing the Recession' is being collected by the NYTimes.com team using an online form, part of a photo solicitation and moderation system it has jokingly nicknamed 'PUFFY' - 'photo upload form for you'.

Editor of the New York Times' newsroom interactive technologies, Aron Pilhofer, told Journalism.co.uk that once the information is uploaded, the tool presents the photos in thumbnail form.

The system was first experimented with in tracking images of the Hudson plane crash to form a user-generated slideshow : "[It was] trial by fire. We finished PUFFY that day. It couldn't have worked out any better," said Pilhofer.

A few weeks later a 'quilt' of photos of Obama's inauguration was assembled , again using the same upload system, in a completely automated moderation system. The quilt could 'find' photos and their information, once approved by the NYTimes.com team.

The system, which in its early days collected photos via a NYTimes email address re-directing to a Gmail account, now allows easier control and access to tags.

The API is exposed: "The team can hit API to see all photos we haven't seen yet, and it gives you a path for you to download it and publish it out."

The use of Gmail was a 'dirty little secret', joked Pilhofer. It is easier to use Gmail's API to extract the photos and more convenient to store the photos via a Gmail rather than an NYTimes account, he said.

The use of Gmail is completely invisible to the contributor and will not be changed in the foreseeable future, he said.

Internal NYTimes.com producers are currently able to do 'super-basic' editing of images, like rotation, and other 'rudimentary features' will be added in a simple way.

"What we didn't want to build was Photoshop on the web," he said. A complementary tool, internally nicknamed 'Mantis', will allow cropping.

The system could also be rolled out in other forms: the team have talked about a version for text; and others for Flickr and mobile.

Journalism.co.uk will be running a series of articles about journalism in New York: watch out for the tag 'JournalismNY' for a range of features on eminent US-based online thinkers and developers.