Panoramio's Blog

We have increased the limit of the photo size to 25Mbytes / 50Mpixels.

You may think: Why do I need this if my camera is not able to shoot such images?

We wanted to be ahead of the game and build a storage system that would allow us to be ready for the future, as cameras improve and Internet speed gets faster.

Creation of Panoramas is also getting trendy, so we are happy to provide photo size limits that allow to store and process them. The next 2 photos are 2 examples of photos that can be uploaded now in Panoramio thanks to these changes:

This Panorama of 24.9MB was created by Balázs using Hugin and it is a panorama of his last Via Ferrata in Furenwald, Switzerland.

This Panorama of 18.9 MB was created by my friend Julian using Autopano and it is a panorama of photos he took in Zurich, Switzerland last time he visited me.

I also wanted to make official what we have already discussed in the forum sometime ago: Google Earth accepted photos will not count towards your storage quota. This makes the storage of your gallery practically unlimited.

I hope you like these changes. We cannot wait to see your fully detailed photos in Panoramio very soon.

Challenge: Visit Photo 1000 and take a team-photo.
Members: Roger, Joaquin, Ana, Jose, Eduardo, Erik and Gerard

Photo 1000 is a very special photo for the Panoramio Team. It is one of the first photos in Panoramio (1000 was a milestone) and it is the photo that we always use to test new features. It is a photo from Fredrik Johansson taken in one of the 23,000 islands in front of Stockholm, in Sweden.

Some months ago in a lunch-chat we decided to visit Erik’s hometown in Sweden as he was always explaining how amazing were the meatballs in his favorite restaurant back in Stockholm, the Pelikan. During one of this conversations we suggested to take advantage of the trip and visit Photo 1000.

There were a couple of challenges on this decision:
1. Photo 1000 is taken in an island that is not reachable by regular ferries.
2. Would Photo 1000 be well geopositioned?

After preparing some logistics we took a regional ferry from Stockholm to the island of Möja (2.5h). There is a fantastic restaurant there that serves fresh local fish, so we enjoyed a nice meal before continuing our trip. From Möja to the coordinates we wanted to go, there is no other option than going by private transportation so Erik talked some days in advance with a local Captain that normally brings tourists to visit seals. He was kind of shocked by our request but he agreed on bringing us there. Before departing, he asked us though whether we wanted to see the seals and he promised we would have enough time for everything. We agreed on that and after an hour or so on the boat we found the seals floating on the sea.

After some seal-shooting we continued and here is were our problems began. The motor of the boat started to make strange noises and what it was worst, daylight started to decline. We were in a hurry to reach the location but the captain could do nothing but decrease the speed. This is when we started to fear that we would never reach the coordinates we pointed the captain to. The boat continued slowly towards final destination and we could see in our GPS devices that we were almost there, not sure though whether we would find what we were looking for.

Some minutes later… the place was there. Everyone on the boat got extremely excited. We managed to find the place and what it is more important: the location was accurate and real!

The captain allowed us to disembark the boat and go to Photo 1000 location while he would call someone for help, as the boat was still making those weird noises. There were obviously no piers in the island so it took a while until the captain found a spot were to attach a rope. We went finally to the place where the photo was taken and we spend some time enjoying the location and taking photos ourselves. 30 min later a strong rain made us go back to the boat while we waited for the motor to be checked. Everything ended fine and we could safely return to harbor.

The result was an Epic Win!

I would like to thank Erik for the organization of the logistics. The team, for the great time I spent in this adventure, the captain for bringing us there, but I would like to thank specially Fredrik Johansson for taking this amazing photo, for geoposition it correctly so we would not get lost, and specially for making us discover this amazing location. Exploring the world with Panoramio can be done in a crazy way (as we just did) or it can be done from your living-room and this is all thanks to all the members of the Panoramio Community that keep on amazing us everyday with those amazing photos of places.

Many thanks to all of you!

P.S.: If you happen to have a similar story or plan to… get in touch and we will publish it in the Panoramio blog!

Again more winners, now are published the winners of the Panoramio monthly Contest for June 2010 edition. Those photos were uploaded in June and voted in July. We will contact the winners via e-mail during the next 30 days in order to organize the prizes. This time we suffered a small delay in the publication of the contest results (I was on holidays) so I hope you will accept my biggest apology.

First Prize of Scenery category taken in Turkey by BEDRİ AKÇAY

First Prize of Unusual Location category taken in the UK by Utpal

First Prize of Heritage category
taken in Ukraine by Edward_Tur

First Prize of Travel category taken in the USA by ☼dOnAlDWMcCuLLoCh☼

Full list of winners

Congratulations!

A total of 94 photographers have won during the last 2 years the Panoramio Geotagged Photo Contest, and this was the perfect excuse to meet up around an exhibition of those great photos.

The event happened during the 7th and 8th of August in the gallery of Ajka (Hungary) thanks to the organization of Imre Lakat. Gábor Hauberger (NightHunter), our beloved Hungarian moderator gave a welcome speech in the opening ceremony.

On the first day, we made a trip to Magyarpolány, a small village close to Ajka where we visited the church and Calvary Hill. On the evening, we had a marvelous dinner on the Somló Hill, which is the smallest, but famous wine region of Hungary. On the second day, we visited a wonderful natural formation, the Karst of Úrkút.

In total, more than 100 participants attended the event, and we all enjoyed the meeting. Thanks Imre for the great organization, and we hope it is not going to be long until we can meet again.

Some links you may be interested:
Photos of the Event
Photos of the event
Photos of the exhibition
Organization of the meeting

Again more winners, now are published the winners of the Panoramio monthly Contest for May 2010 edition. Those photos were uploaded in May and voted in June. We will contact the winners via e-mail during the next 30 days in order to organize the prizes.

First Prize of Scenery category taken in Denmark by Jan Sognnes

First Prize of Unusual Location category taken in Turkey by OLYMPIST ©

First Prize of Heritage category taken in Turkey by MEHMET GÜÇLÜ ©

First Prize of Travel category taken in Sweden by Oram62

Full list of winners

Congratulations!

We all like having our photos well tagged and organized, despite this can be sometimes a tedious work. This is why I spend a bit of time working on Auto tagging.

Auto tagging will suggest during the Panoramio upload different tags regarding time and location.

• Time: Auto tagging will suggest a year tag from the EXIF of your photo
• Location: Auto tagging will suggest Country, State/County and City tags following the Latlong data from the EXIF of your photo. If the EXIF does not have Latlong data Auto tagging will suggest those tags when you map the photo. Location tags are suggested in the language you are viewing Panoramio during Upload time.

Remember that tags are also carried over by using the Upload to Panoramio option of Picasa Web Albums.

I hope these small options will help you in your Upload process. Please let me and the team know your thoughts and any suggestion you may have regarding Auto tagging so we can make it even more useful, in our Panoramio Community Forum.

…and as the title of this post suggests, we are introducing some changes here and there in the Photo Page. We are changing the Best of feature to like and adding new counters to the Photo details section of the Photo Page.

We have found that Best of was not really defining the concept behind it. Ideally Best of should apply for a unique situation for a very small subset of the photos. However, we discovered that several users use the Best of flag to mark many photos that they like. So we have decided to re-brand Best of as like. To make it more useful, Like not only comes with a nicer icon right under the photo, but we included the total number of likes in the Photo details section. Have you changed your mind? You don’t like a photo anymore? No problem. You can revoke your previous likes any time in the future.

But wait! There are more changes in the Photo details section.
We know that numbers and statistics are important for you. Previously we used to show only one counter, the number of views on Panoramio for each photo. We are happy to announce that today, we are adding three more numbers for each photo:
views on Google Earth: This number shows the number of times a bubble has been opened in Google Earth with your photo. We have looked back for a year, and initialized all these counters based on those bubble openings. Note, that this counter is only updated daily.
favorites: This number shows how many members of the Panoramio Community selected your photo as favorite by clicking the star icon above the photo.
likes: As described earlier, this counter shows how many people decided to like your photo.

Please check the help content for more info about the counters.

Feel free to discuss the new photo details and the like feature in the Panoramio forum as we are thinking in more numbers to show you and more regarding your photos.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could see more pictures when you access Panoramio, Google Maps or Google Earth?
Well this is now possible thanks to the new Panoramio Uploader for Android.
This new application available in the Market, allows you to upload pictures to Panoramio on the go. You just need an Android device(*) and some amazing spot!

Uploading is easy, the application seamlessly integrates with the Android experience allowing you to share photos straight from the Camera and Gallery applications.

Mapping is easy, if the photo was taken by a GPS powered device then the location is automatically calculated and the map preview is presented.
If there is no GPS information or in case you need to adjust the location just tap on the map, and you can easily locate your picture.

Finally just upload and enjoy your photos in Panoramio, Google Earth and Google Maps!

Remember all photos uploaded to Panoramio are candidates to be shown in Google Earth and Google Maps. And please let us know as always your opinion in the Panoramio Community Forum

(*) Panoramio Uploader for iPhone also exist

Again more winners, now are published the winners of the Panoramio monthly Contest for April 2010 edition. Those photos were uploaded in April and voted in May. We will contact the winners via e-mail during the next 30 days in order to organize the prizes.

First Prize of Scenery category taken in Iceland by Sig Holm

First Prize of Unusual Location category taken in Namibia by americatramp.the2nd

First Prize of Heritage category taken in Romania by Αταραξία by Marian

First Prize of Travel category
taken in France by &ri.co

Full list of winners

Congratulations!

Since we launched the Widget API we have received a lot of positive feedback to improve it. One of the biggest requests was the possibility to combine a UserID and Tag in the same widget to allow users to explain a story using a widget. I am happy to announce that this is live!

With a User-Tag Widget, you will be able to create a widget containing the images of your special occasion, your trip, that amazing excursion, or whatever you can imagine. You can create a widget to show your own photos but you can also create a widget to show the photos of others. You will just need to select the right user_id and tag combination.

Last weekend for example, I went hiking in Schwyzerland. I compiled my Panoramio images of that excursion in a tag and now I can embed them in a Slideshow in my blog:

To use this widget in your site or blog you can do it by just adding the following code:

<iframe frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://www.panoramio.com/wapi/template/slideshow.html?user=3616830&tag=Panoramaweg-Schwyz" width="400" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0"></iframe>

Just remember to select the right user_id and tag.

There are other widget types you can use, like the Photo List Widget. For more information on those other widgets please check the documentation.

Feel free to use our Forum to discuss about this topic. We keep on working to improve the Widget API, and your feedback is more than welcomed!