The Freemap blog, revisited

A significant update since my last post: you can now create and modify routes on OTV’s main page. As you’re probably aware, the key thing about OTV is to allow contributors to connect photos together, to make a route of interlinked photos which end-users will be able to walk along to create a StreetView like experience. The essentials of this are now done – you can create a new route (select “New route” on the main map page) by connecting together existing photos, and you can also add photos to an existing route by selecting “Move” on the main page and dragging the chosen photo onto a route. More information on the Howto page.

So do have a go contributing some of your own photos and making routes. Being in development, the odd bug could well come up so do let me know if you’re having problems.

As already suggested, next thing will be to start working on a prototype viewer for end-users though a range of other things like work commitments, moving house and a holiday are going to be occupying most of my time for the next three weeks or so, so it *may* be some time before the next update. But don’t go away, in the autumn and winter months I’ll hopefully be doing a fair bit of OTV development!

No huge OTV updates over the last couple of days, but a few things relating to panoramas:

- Panoramas are once again displayed as panoramas on the main page. Rather than using vanilla JSPanoViewer, they’re now using a <canvas> tag based approach, which means they’re not visible in IE (sorry if you’re using IE, but you could always use Firefox or Chrome ), the code is based on JSPanoViewer and is available here.
- OTV will now autodetect whether your uploaded photo is a panorama; if the width is more than 1024 pixels and the height is less than half the width, then it’s treated as a panorama. You can of course change this on the photo manager page.

Anyway that’s it for now. As I said before, next will be working on the interface for end-users and for making routes of connected photos.

Some significant developments in OpenTrailView in the last couple of weeks. As mentioned in my last post, I’ve been working on a nicer photo upload system; in particular, one which allows multiple photo uploads. This makes use of Andrew Valums’ JavaScript library for doing just this, which is available at valums.com/ajax-upload and is now done, though it only works on newer browsers (tested on Firefox 3.6 and Chrome 5.0). Other browsers such as Opera only allow one file to be uploaded at a time.

The other new development is the photo management system. Via a “photo album” style system, you can specify the lat/lon of any unpositioned photos, and group together photos taken from the same point in different directions, specifying the angle of each photo in the group relative to the first member of the group. This hopefully makes the whole upload process significantly easier than the rather clunky system in place initially.

Note also that I’m shifting my focus – for the moment at least – from panoramas to regular photos (and groups of photos taken from the same point in different directions). Panoramas still appear, but owing to incompatibilities between the JavaScript of the pano viewer and some of the other JS libraries used, the “immersive” pano viewing is disabled for the moment.

Next stage will be to work on the key features of OTV which make it different to regular geolocated photo sites: namely the ability to connect photos together and allow an end user to “walk along” a series of connected photos. I hope I’ve made the contribution process easier, so the next step is to focus on the end users of the site.