Allow for links-list style reorganizing of userpics

[fiddlingfrog]

Title
Allow for links-list style reorganizing of userpics

Short, concise description of the idea
Allow for userpics to be reorganized using the same mechanism currently used to re-order the links list in journal layouts.

Full description of the idea
There have been many calls over the years to allow for userpic reorganization. This is a specific implementation idea.

So over time users acquire many userpics, and they might not necessarily go in a logical order. You might have a picture of the Eiffel tower stuck in between to pictures of your dog, or what turns out to be your most-used non-default userpic could be stuck halfway down the list. I propose that LJ provide a mechanism to reorder userpics, and that this order be used in all places where a user is presented a listing of userpics (Post an Entry, comment forms, & Current Userpics)

The mechanism I suggest is to add a Position field to Manage Userpics, much like the Order field on the Links List page. This would allow for users to arbitrarily re-order their userpics as they liked, either renumbering every userpic or inserting userpics in-between others.

Like this:

Currently uploaded: 4 out of 212.



Position: 10

Keywords: Me
Comment:
Θ Default ⌈⌋ Delete



Position: 20

Keywords: sad Kiki
Comment: from Kiki's Delivery Service by Hayao Miyazaki
O Default ⌈⌋ Delete



Position: 30

Keywords: frog thor
Comment: Image of Throg, Frog of Thunder
O Default ⌈⌋ Delete



Position: 40

Keywords: theatre masks
Comment: comedy & tragedy projected onto a curtain
O Default ⌈⌋ Delete

If you look at the structure of a userpic's URL (http://userpic.livejournal.com/111179842/914305), you see that it contains two numbers. The first is an absolute number referring to that userpic and the second is the userid of that user. Your userpics are sorted on Current Userpics by the absolute number, which corresponds to upload order.

Digging around it seems likely that there's over 116 million userpics uploaded over the years. That's far too many to try and add a new field to each pic (keyword and comments are already attached, and if there were unused fields or it was feasible to add a new field then LJ probably would have done so already), so I wonder if it'd be simpler to just juggle the files around in the database. For instance, in the example above my userpics are numbered 4231557 (default), 105304884 (Kiki) , 112099917 (Throg), and 115852746 (masks). If I wanted the masks right after my default I'd re-order them using the Position fields on Manage Userpics and then I'd hit save. At that point, the database would start churning and would shuffle the pics around so that they would be numbered 4231557 (default), 105304884 (masks), 112099917 (Kiki), and 115852746 (Throg). The database would also have to change the keyword and comment fields associated with that particular number userpic.

Because this is a database intensive operation I imagine it'd be fair to charge a small fee, just as is done for a rename. Since this is (probably, I'd imagine) less intensive a task than tracking down all mentions of a username across the entire site, one or two dollars seems appropriate.
An ordered list of benefits

• Happy, happy, happy users.
• A small revenue stream.

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

• Engineering time.
• Database issues.
• Any hardcoded links to a specific userpic (like in my example above) will now link to the wrong userpic.