São Miguel island was a perfect place to experiment with the new “Look around” feature. I took many overlapped photos in the most interesting landmarks in order to get “look around” links. It worked pretty well and only 10 days after the upload, the photos have been reviewed and got the “Look around” link. Sometimes my photos have joined an existing “Look around” group of photos, but other times they have created a new “look around”. The results were very cool, so I decided to share them and my conclusions:

- Vista do Rei: the most famous sightseeing place of São Miguel
- Lagoa Verde and Lagoa Azul: if you move to the right you can even see where I parked my car
- Mosteiros cliffs: Nice sight, but I didn’t get all photos connected in a perfect 360º panorama
- Lagoa Verde from a small beach: it worked perfectly here, you can see both sides of the lake
- Lagoa do Fogo: beautiful lake, but my photos of the sides didn’t get connected
- Termal beach in Ferraria: pretty small, I got it unintentionally

I thought that two overlapping photos for each shot were enough (on the right and left sides) to get the photo inside the “look around”, but actually the algorithm seems to work better with more than 2 overlapping photos, 3 or 4 is Ok. Anyway, the more photos you take, the higher probability of getting the magic link.

After playing a lot with this feature I have to say that I love it. The “look around” gives you the freedom to choose your own perspective and a magic feeling. I feel like I can turn my head in the direction I want and explore the place personally.

- PhotoTrack by Ryan Calhoun: allows you to track the times your photos have been viewed

- Panoramio Random Gallery Viewer by Andre Speek

- Photo Finder Widget by Piet Jonas: to embeed a small widget in your website

- iPhone Web App by Piet Jonas: browse Panoramio photos in your iPhone

- Phto Finder for Apple Dashboard by Piet Jonas

- Thumbnail Post Creator for Panoramio by Andre Speek, a tool to get thumbnails in a size that fits good for the forum

The next update will be around August 10th and will include photos reviewed before July 27th.

First Prize of Scenery category

taken in United Kingdom by Alan Knox

First Prize of Heritage category

taken in France by Nicolas Aubé

First Prize of Travel category

taken in Spello, Italy by marita1004

First Prize of Unusual Location category

taken in Chile by Dejah

Full list of winners

Congratulations to all of them!

We will meet in the Google offices, where we will have an informal gathering and have something to eat and drink. Joaquín Cuenca and Jose Florido from the Panoramio team will be there.

Space is limited to 40 people, so please, register using this form.

Date: 4 July 2008 from 17:00 to 19:00

Location:
Google’s Office in Paris
38, Avenue de l’Opéra
75002
Paris - See location in Google Maps.

More information in the meeting page.

I just made a small walk in St Peter square in Rome and watched the panoramic views of Alhambra from Albaicín. Did you ever watch the faces of the US presidents in Mount Rushmore so close?. There is a never ending list of places to explore: the roofs of Lisbon from Santa Justa, Chicago from Hancock’s tower by night, the sights of Stockholm from Katarinahissen, the Red Square of Moscow, Brandenburg gate in Berlin, the white marbles of Taj Mahal or the Sydney Opera House, just to mention a few examples. Take care, I am already addicted.

You will find the link “look around” only for photos in areas with high density of images. The most interesting places to “look around” are squares, towers or any location where people took photo in many different directions. Having many overlapped photos means that you can move very far away from the starting point, almost like a real walk.

If you want to get a “look around” link under your photos or you would like to have this experience in your favorite place, that’s easy. Just go to that place and start shooting photos in every direction. Photos should overlap so the matching system can work and using a tripod should help to get matches. If you prefer to move while taking photos, later it would be possible to follow your path. Photos of details get embedded inside wide perspectives and allow a nice zoom-in effect. Depends very much on the place, but around 10-20 photos should be enough to get the “look around”. The link will not appear immediately, the system will be initially refreshed every two weeks, but it will get faster after some time.

We projected photos from London from some of the attendants in the same way we did in Barcelona. Ade took some photos and we are collecting more photos in the forum.

Special thanks Liz Ericson from Google UK for the great organization.

We reacted started deleting those fake users and comments using an internal automated script, but soon we realized that it was going to take too long for the database to delete all them, maybe several days. Therefore we did something that worked faster. We deleted all the text of those spam comments to eliminate the dangerous links. That worked immediately and that’s why you will see now many spam comments without text. Gradually during the next days those fake users and the empty comments will be completely deleted. We also have temporarily disabled all e-mail alerts for new comments to reduce the impact of the spam in your mailbox.

Joaquin is working right now in adding a captcha (code inside an image) to the sign-up and to the “add a comment”. A captcha is only readable by humans, so it should stop further automated massive attacks. However until the captcha is ready is possible you get some more spam.

Panoramio has been relavitely free of Spam for almost 3 years, but the more popular the site gets, the more probable is an attack. We are terribly sorry for this problem and we would like to apologize for all the trouble that it might have caused to you. I would like to thank all the people that reported the problem and helped to fix it, specially Panamon Creel who contacted snipUrl service and got them to disable the malicious links and block the IP of the spammer.

First Prize of Scenery category

taken in the FYRM by Neim Sejfuli ♦

First Prize of Heritage category

taken in Sicily (Italy) by Gibrail

First Prize of Travel category

taken in Northern Italy by © Massimo De Candido

First Prize of Unusual Location category

taken in Thailand by picsonthemove

Full list of winners

It took us a little bit more time than expected to organize everything, but this is the first edition and everything will be smoother for the next one. Also some people asked to reduce the number of photos submitted per user. We agree about that and for the June contest the number of photos per participant will be limited to 5.