6:36 AM - Photo gallery update and GPS status. (posted by
Allen
)
Greetings from Iowa, folks. This week I discovered I still had some work to do getting my 2007 photos updated. I had some more pictures from Iowa's Adventureland I had never added to the gallery, and it seems I had fogotten to sort and upload the pictures I took at SeaWorld Orlando last October as well.
So, the Adventureland gallery has been updated (making over 1000 images from 2007), but SeaWorld still needs to be organized. This may take some time because I am still very unfamiliar with the park (and don't have much time these days). Now that I have been reminded, I'll try to find time to work on getting them updated.
Meanwhile, another project has been going on. I purchased a GPS tracking device late last year and took it with me on trips to Walt Disney World, Sea World Orlando, and Disneyland Resort in California. It allowed me to place GPS location information in all of the photos I took. which I have now finally done. Since I had already sorted and posted images from those parks (except Sea World), I will now have to regenerate those galleries and re-upload them. In coming days, I hope to have this done.
The end result? Nothing yet, except that if you open one of my pictures in software that honors GPS information, it will be able to show an approximate location where the image was taken. Services such as Flickr and programs such as Google Earth can do this. Eventually, the plan is to have links in my gallery to special map pages where you can view all the images as thumbnails on a map, then click on them to see them full size. The problem with this is that I take so many photos, a map would be nearly impossible to view. I hope to get around this by splitting them down by section. i.e. if you are in the Disneyland -> New Orleans Square -> Haunted Mansion gallery, you would just see the photos on a map from that part of the gallery. (Again, this could be hundreds of images and may not be practical.) We'll see if this works out.
Also, since GPS isn't magic, things like clouds, tree cover, going in to buildings, etc. causes the signal to be lost so there will always be images that aren't correctly placed. While I could manually adjust images by hand in software to correctly place them on the map, I have something called "a life" (most of you should be familiar with that) and I don't really want to manually go through and verify ten thousand GPS-enabled photos to adjust them by hand where needed.
So that's a quick update... I'll send out another one once the Disney images are re-uploaded, and again later when SeaWorld 2007 is posted.
(And for long time DisneyFans visitors -- you may recall I used to post my renaissance festival images on this site back in the days before I split them off to a second site, www.atthefaire.com. I will be re-uploading the Kansas City Renaissance Festival images from 2007 as well with GPS information. At some point in time.)
Happy belated St. Patrick's Day...