James – If you really are that lazy (and I’m sure you are not) then I’m surprised that you have the energy to make the observations in the first place! Each section will have its own way of accepting observations and the basic rules are pretty easy to follow. You don’t need to remember them, you can use the wonderful invention of writing to make notes and set up a procedure to follow for each object. It will then only take a few minutes of your time.
I have never dismissed people as “not serious observers” if they don’t want to do this. It is personal choice and the quality of the images in the gallery is fantastic whether or not you want to submit them to the section. I would like to encourage you to do so but you need to follow our rules. That means making sure that all of the key observation details are recorded and using a filename which is compatible with our requirements. One of the things that makes the BAA special is that we do try to encourage people to think of the science behind their observations. For me, that greatly increases my enjoyment of the hobby. It will be different for others.
As Dominic says, we could spend time trying to make the gallery into a source for the section archive but there are other priorities for our website developers at the moment and this would still mean that many images would not be imported since they lack critical details.
As a compromise, I’m currently discussing with Denis whether he is willing to manually collect data from the gallery that has appropriate metadata and reformat it so that it can be put in the archive. I’ll let you know the outcome of that discussion.