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.