The Cruise photos are now online at zooomr. There are a lot of them and a couple of big panorama ones too so don’t view them on dialup! All the photos are in the Cruise album or you can look at each country individually. Let me know what you think and what you think of the zooomr interface. There are a couple of things I’d love to change but at least it gives me free storage for the large amount of photos. All the photos are also downloadable in their original size too.
I’ve been trying to use Microsoft’s WWMX application to geotag some of the photos that we took on holiday ready to upload to zooomr, but the level of mapping detail for Jamaica and Grand Cayman Islands was pretty awful However I have found that by using Garmin’s mapsource to load the track data from the gps and then saving the tracks to a gpx I can then use wwmx to automatically tag the photos if I had the gps on at the time the photos were taken.
However, for the rest of the photos that were taken without the gps I needed a better way of marking where they are taken. A combination of picassa and google earth makes the job very easy. First the photo’s need to be loaded into Picassa – this will probably be done automatically (although for some reason Picassa doesn’t like to find my cruise photos and they disappear from the folder view even though I can see them being scanned). Anyway, once the photos have been loaded, select the photos that need to be geotagged and then go to the tools menu, geotag, geotag with google earth. Then use Google Earth to navigate to the spot that the photos were taken -the satellite view does an outstanding job for this. Then just hit geotag, select the next picture and repeat (or do geotag all if they are all in the same place. At this point, the locations are written to the picture (exif data I presume) and can then be uploaded to flickr or zooomr already geotagged for you.
As it will take some time to load the cruise photo’s, I took some pictures of the Pumpkin Festival at Oakland Nursery including the Worlds Fastest Pumpkin Carver and entries for the Worlds biggest pumpkin.
I’ve reuploaded my Sidney pictures to zooomr although I’ve yet to go through and label them with details. Some of them are of interesting buildings, sculpture and architecture and some are of childhood memories for Kristen.
I also uploaded some Little Morton Hall pictures which I made into portals.
Zooomr are apparently releasing an update on Monday which will activate notes on photos and something they are calling portals. Like Notes, an area of the photo is hotlinked to give you a scrolling view of another photo (such as a closeup shot of an area in the first photo). You can scroll around the closeup within the original photo and then click on it to zoom into the next photo – A unique implementation. The blog post by Kristopher has a link to the YouTube video of it in action.
We got tickets to go to the Dublin Irish Festival so went over this afternoon. Personally I didn’t think there was much there apart from a lot of Irish shops but I wasn’t interested in buying some Irish tat ;-), a lot of overpriced food and drink stands but the Funnel cake was delicious and the first time I’d had one. It was very hot so the soft iced lemon stand was doing very well and was nice and refreshing.
After wandering around the festival we headed back to the traditional stage and watched Gaelic Storm perform a set. They were very good with a lot of audience participation. I’ve uploaded my photos of Dublin Irish Festival to my zooomr profile (as it has more space than Flickr) and also set up a smartset in case other people also upload photo’s.
I also managed to take some video of one of their drum solo’s which I uploaded to YouTube.
Edit Updated the YouTube link as I uploaded the wrong video to start with!
Well Zooomr is back at last – It’s been out of action since last Thursday as they prepared their upgrade and then got hit by a DOS attack. I was beginning to wonder if the whole thing was a hoax dreamed up by flickr so that anyone who was thinking of defecting would stay with flickr 😉 (thats a joke Mr Lawyer man). Anyway, they are now back online but the site must still be under stress as it is really really slow – must have taken about 45 seconds to load the front page for me.
Zooomr are giving away free pro accounts to bloggers (like me) that sign up and post an image from their servers so the image below is my deer photo taken with the cameraphone last night whilst out to do a geocache – GCWFY1. Funny thing is that I can’t see any information about what a pro account is on their site – a free account gives you 50mb storage (plus 1mb per user you refer).
I went out this morning and walked along the new trail in Dublin alongside (or above) the river. It was nice and peaceful, with one guy even bringing a deckchair and he was sitting there reading the newspaper. I’m not quite sure why he needed a deckchair as there were plenty of benches to sit on instead. There were several people around, but most of them were older couples taking their morning stroll. I took several photo’s – playing around with the exposure settings of the camera and have uploaded some of them to flickr – I wish I could have got a clearer photo of the spider though but I didn’t have my full size tripod with me and it was too difficult to take a photo on the macro setting, zoomed in without it appearing out of focus. It’s a really nice place to go for a stroll or a picnic (with lots of picnic tables along the route). You can either park
For my uk readers, snapfish are doing a promotion until the 22nd January with up to 50 6*4 prints for 1p each. Shame I don’t live in the uk anymore!
Kristen had an upsetting moment when she plugged in the XD card from the camera and saw the following
It looked like all the photos that she had taken today were corrupt and unreadable (and translated into chinese!). Fortunately I remembered reading about PC Inspector File recovery which I had tried out but not in a real life scenario. One download later and a search of the hard drive returned lots of image files stored on the disk (as expected). Recovering them was just a matter of selecting whereabouts I wanted to put the files (on a different disk). There were two options available. The first was using FAT1 and the second was to use FAT2. When I used FAT1 most of the files came back ok, but there were several files that came back slightly corrupted – this one is one of the worst
Some of the other photos have been uploaded to my Birdtable zoto gallery as Kristen took some excellent pictures of the birds on the birdtable today.