phTagr

phTagr supports now (simple) geo tagging of the media. Input fields where added to the meta data form and the latitude and longitude values could be entered directly. Additional, the google map shows the current location of the center which could be used through copy’n'paste for the geo input.

So select an image with geo location, open the map and center the map to the location for the new media. Copy the location below the map and insert it into the geo input form.

Happy Geo Tagging!

Update 2009-11-03: A context menu was added to help to navigate through the map, which is opened by the right mouse click. It adds following actions: Zoom in, Zoom out, Zoom in here, and Center here. Especially the last action is helpful to find the correct position!

Recently the welcome page of phtagr was redesigned and is now more responsive.

The tag and category clouds are moved down whereas a random picture and a couple new media are shown on the top.  These changes are more informative for new and old visitors who want to know whats going on.

Go have a look!

A new awesome option was finally added to phTagr: the anonymous user registration. With this option enabled users can register by themselves and get a initial upload quota. The initial upload quota is set by the site admin in the registration settings.

After the user submits initial data like username, password and email the user must confirm the account creation by a key which is sent to his email address.

This new feature will now gain thousands and thousands of new user *harhar*.

See all the screenshots of the user registration.

A new HTML upload functionality was recently committed. Users can now upload files easily via the web browser in the ‘My Files’ section (while the more advanced functionality over the webdav interface still remains).

The new upload functionality is basic, but has some nifty features: Users can create folders to keep an order and upload files to the new created folder. Also files of a ZIP archives could be extracted automatically.

See the new screenshots at the demo page and happy uploading!

Recently a new input filter for GPS data was added to phTagr. Now, NMEA files from GPS logger such as Sony’s GPSCS1 can be imported directly and adds the GPS coordinates of the images. Combined with Google Maps it adds a nice feature to the gallery to locate your image inside the map.

The GPS coordinates are exported to the EXIF header as GPSLatitude, GPSLatitudeRef, GPSLongitude, GPSLongitudeRef values on the next meta data sync.

While the GPS data are saved in UCT, your timezone of your image might be a different one. The current implementation has a static time offset of two hours (UCT+2), but a special option should be implemented soon. Also an import filter for KML files would be a nice option.

phTagr supports now authenticated RSS and direct link for guest’s images through a special key parameter.

The new feature is helpful for your RSS feed reader to fetch all recent images or comments. In the past only the public images where gathered for the RSS feed. Now you can use the special authenticated RSS link from Preferences -> RSS to get all the updates for your account including non public images and comments.

Such authenticated RSS links are also available for guest accounts via Preferences -> Guest Accounts -> Guest -> Links. The media RSS could be used to embed special images of a guest account, eg. through the WordPress Plugin gSlideShow.

Further a single direct link of a Guest’s images could be sent to friends via Preferences -> Guest Accounts -> Guest -> Links. Our friends dont have to remember the login username or password anymore: The page My Images of the guest is directly shown.

The key parameter authenticates the user for the current (and temporary) session only. For permanent authentication the user has to be log in via username and password. Since the authenticated RSS or direct link should be used carefully, the key could be renewed easily in the corresponding menu.

phTagr supports now user comments and visitors and users could comment on images or videos. The home side shows the recent comments and a comment RSS is also availiable via URL comments/rss, e.g. from the demo page: http://demo.phtagr.org/comments/rss. See the screenshots or try it out.

Recent comments on home side

Add a new comment (for visitors with captcha)

Add a new comment (for users)

Dear admin

A new comment of image PICT7375.JPG was submitted.

View image: http://demo.phtagr.org/images/view/113
Delete comment: http://demo.phtagr.org/comments/delete/3

From: Jon Doe
Date: 2008-08-10 12:46:09

If you are anonymous you have to enter your name, email and a captcha to your comment.

You are notified about new comments via email if you select "Notify me on new comments".

Sincerely

Your phTagr Agent

Since phTagr supports Media RSS it is quite simple to embed a simple slideshow to your page via Googles Feed API. It supports a slide show control which loads the Media RSS and displays the images one by one. The API reference of Google’s slide show control is straight forward and with few changes your web side displays the newest public images of your gallery. Following example shows the embedded slideshow of images from the phTagr demo page:

<h2>Photos</h2>
<p>
  <script src='http://www.google.com/jsapi' type='text/javascript'></script>
  <script src='http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/slideshow/gfslideshow.js' type='text/javascript'></script>
  <style type='text/css'>
    .gss a img {
      border : none;
    }
    .gss {
      width: 180px;
      height: 180px;
      color: #dddddd;
      background-color: #fff;
      padding: 5px;
      border: 1px solid #eee;
    }
  </style>
  <script type='text/javascript'>
    function load() {
      var samples = 'http://demo.phtagr.org/explorer/media/media.rss';
      var options = {
        displayTime: 2500,
        transistionTime: 600,
        scaleImages: true,
        fullControlPanel: true,
        linkTarget: google.feeds.LINK_TARGET_BLANK
      };
      new GFslideShow(samples, 'slideshow', options);
    }
    google.load('feeds', '1');
    google.setOnLoadCallback(load);
  </script>

  <div id='slideshow' class='gss'>Loading...</div>
</p>

I wrote a small WordPress gSlideShow widget plugin (based FlickrRSS) on  which embeds your Media RSS to your blog (download). Enjoy!

phTagr supports now Media RSS for the explorer. The extention of RSS is defined by Yahoo and with it, phTagr supports PicLens – a great slide show program for web image collections. PicLens has nice extensions for IE and Firefox which create cool 3D slide shows, too. Unfortunatly PicLens does not support Linux currently but it has a quite usefull PicLensLite flash component. PicLensLite supports a basic flash slide show with configurable show duration. As full backup – if no PicLens extension and no flash is installed – LyteBox is used, a famous javascript thumbnail viewer. And if you have not extension, no flash, no javascript? Well, click through the page manually!

The newest version of phTagr comes with a Media RSS support and buildin PicLensLight. If you have PicLens extension installed, you are able to watch you current image search within the explorer in fancy 3D. Otherwise you can use PicLensLite or LyteBox.

The real cool thing about this new feature in phTagr is that you can create your favourite search (e.g. images with category ‘vacation’ and location ‘italy’ and exclude images with tag ‘night’) and you can watch your selection through the nice slideshow of PicLens. Thanks to Media RSS and PicLens.com. Test the new feature at the demo page! Now!

phTagr works great to organize your local image collection. You can add a local system directory in the ‘Users‘ section to import files directly from your system (alternatively you can upload files using webdav, however WebDAV is not working with the suPHP module). To import files, simply go to ‘My Files‘ and import the files from your directories. Currently only JPEG and video files are supported. exiftool is used to read (and write) the meta data. A call requires lots of time and I recommend not to import more than 120 images at once.

In the ‘Explorer‘ you can tag your images by tag, category, or location. To write the tagged information to the images (using IPTC via the exiftool) you need to click on ‘Synchronize‘ in the ‘My Files‘ section. Within this process the imported files from your system will be modified. As far as I know, exiftool is very save and wont corrupt our images. But you never know – and so it is better to make some backups before!

Should anything go wrong or if you want to know what phTagr is currently doing, just have a look on ./tmp/logs/logger.log in the phtagr directory.