I work at BillionGraves, and I wanted to thank you for your mention and for your comments on what we could improve. We’re eager to make this a useful tool for genealogists, so we’re always happy to hear what needs you have.

As for non-monument photos, our developers have put a sort of photo-checker in place that we’re hoping will catch photos that won’t be useful. It will delay the photos’ posting publicly on the site–perhaps 2-24 hours–during which the person who took photos can log into their account on the site and edit their contributions. Hopefully the image checker will catch these sorts of slip ups: we’ll be keeping an eye on things and make adjustments as necessary.

Thanks again for your feedback!

In FindAGrave it’s bad if a grave is unreadable, but at least it’s a photo of the grave of a person which is already specified. In BillionGraves once a photo is deemed unreadable it’s basically useless and should be removed from the system, or perhaps trigger a request for someone to take a better picture at that location. I don’t know if the GPS in cell phones is good enough to direct people back to the same gravestone, but that might be a nice feature. Kind of like geocaching in cemeteries.

My question about the photo of the grave that is cut off on the side is not about it being cut off, but if it’s actually the back side of the gravestone. I’m guessing the name of the person buried is on the other side. The inability to link photos of the same gravestone is a major weakness of BillionGraves. As a fix for this, they should add a feature to the transcription interface that shows photos taken nearby (which is easy considering they’re all geotagged) and allows one to link photos which are of the same grave. Unfortunately, this isn’t foolproof since there may be similar looking gravestones each with writing on both sides and you might mix them up. AppTime really needs to add a feature to the cell phone app to allow multiple photos of the same gravestone.