I applaud you for this contribution of effort and resources to this cause. I can see some long-term concerns, of course. Since this project makes no money, it's continued existence is going to be wholly dependent on you continuing to care enough about it to put in the time and resources to keep it going, without any tangible reward, or else on somehow getting others to willingly contribute to it as well, either in terms of donating money, or else in donating time and effort, or both; and of distributing some of the work among any such volunteers.
Perhaps you should think about some means of attracting and vetting potential volunteers to help with the work involved in running this project. I was thinking, last night, as I was entering my equipment, and uploading the photographs to prove that I had them; I was wondering was there some automated process that evaluated these photographs, or did it require the work of a live human being. You seem to have answered that question, and I wonder what the chance is that your project may become popular enough that you and your wife are unable to spare enough time to process the verifications as fast as they are being submitted.
One matter of individual data about which I am wondering. Your site tries to offer an estimated value for each item, as well as a total, both for new and used instances. Most of the values it came up with for most of my items seem plausible. The values that it came up with for my F2 seem possibly a bit on the optimistic side, but not outrageously so. I have a couple of very old lenses,for which the estimated values seem unrealistically high.
Both are non-AI lenses, made in the 1970s, and dated according to the site at
Nikon Lens Versions and Serial Nos. I believe I paid about $90 for each of these lenses, used, in 1986.
One is a
50mm ƒ1.4 lens, made in 1972. Lenstag is valuing it at $216 new and $188 used. This is a model that was last made in 1973, so there obviously wouldn't be any new instances of it now. I suppose if there was, $216 might be a plausible price for it, but $188 seems like an awfully high appraisal for one that is more than forty years old, unless it gets some of that value from being an “antique” or something similar. I'm thinking it likely that Lenstag is averaging this in with a variety of more modern 50mm ƒ1.4 lenses, as although individual models and variants come and go, there always seems to be some 50mm ƒ1.4 lens among Nikon's current lineup at any time.
More startling is a
28mm ƒ3.5 lens, made in 1975. Lenstag appraises it at $896 new and $764 used. Again, there's really no possibility of a new instance of this lens, as this version hasn't been made since 1977; and it looks like the last instance of any 28mm ƒ3.5 lens made by Nikon ended production in the early 1980s.
That last one is the one that really made me wonder. Is it possible that my 28mm is really worth that much? I can see the 50mm's value being overestimated, just as a simple matter of having not made any distinction between it and all the other 50mm ƒ1.4 models that have been made after it, and averaging it together with all these more modern variants; but there haven't been nearly as many variations on an ƒ3.5 28mm lens, and most of the variations that did exist were made before the variant that I have.