The photos from our Canada trip are now uploaded. I haven’t entered any captions or explanations yet though – that will take some time to do. I had hoped to use Zooomr to host the photos but their infinite upload program just doesn’t work. It has uploaded a lot of the photos but a lot of them also come up as “Sorry this photo is currently unavailable”. I’m about to give up on Zooomr as there seems to be no interest in fixing the problems that have existed ever since the botched upgrade to version 3 took place back in May sometime. Unfortunately the head of Zooomr seems to be now focused on the Japanese market and gimmicks and less on the multitude of fixes. A real shame as they had a promising product. So, my pictures are hosted on my website for now and I’ll update the descriptions soon – honest!
Zooomr is down for maintenance as they push out version 3 – looks like some really good features when it goes live on Thursday (or later)
The pumpkin carving has been done and the results are uploaded to zooomer
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 been puzzling over the missing pictures in internet explorer after the post two before this one had the picture missing. In internet explorer on the main page at absoblogginlutely.net you will get just an empty space where the google map picture is, but if you click on the space you will get taken to the larger image so it really is there.
If you click through to the monthly archive or individual entry the image shows up fine.
I know the problem is partly to do with the align=”left” attribute on the image – if I remove this, then the image appears again properly. I know that this should really be styled with css, so I put the float=”left” on the image and the image disappears again. If you add the “position=relative” to the css then the image appears again and the text wraps around correctly but if the page is wide the graphic overflows out of the background image and spoils the effect.
There are several posts on the internet that I’ve found describing my problem but I couldn’t find a solution.1 2 3
The following posts were made from a sample posting to demonstrate the problem (I chose a garish yellow background to make it easier to see where everything is). As all these screenshots are hosted on zooomr and I’ve used the blog picture functionality, which includes styling on each picture posting, these images look ok in this posting but the styling is a pain to type in for each picture and not exactly easy to remember either.
The original posting with an empty picture.
The same posting viewed in firefox – looks great
and in firefox again, extra wide – the image stays within the background box.
Remove the float left and the picture appears in internet explorer
But if I set float=left within css the image disappears again.
Add position=”relative” and the image reappears again and looks great
Until I change the width of the browser and then the image bleeds outside of the box.
I uploaded a whole load of photos to zooomr the other day after going around Sidney, Ohio and taking lots of pictures of the architecture. I uploaded a lot of those photos as private ones so I could prepare them with portal features before releasing to the public but it seems that photos that are uploaded as private cannot be made public again (for the time being). There is also an issue with weird punctuation in user names as there are some sets that work with my username (absoblogginlutely!) and some that dont as they drop off the exclamation mark. I got feedback from the support guys – their email address is [email protected] but they may take some time to reply. When I got a reply from the posting I made on their website asking for this information, the comment posting had 1058 comments awaiting approval – looks like they are going to be busy.
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.