I use Pano alot for outdoor photography but I want more from this neat iPhone app. My iOS is version 4.01 (jailbroken) so I believe it does not work with Apple’s HDR technology which is too bad because blown out skies occur frequently with panorama shots. Pano is also brutal to line up the overlay area in bright light situations (developer request: maybe widen the overlay area in the future). The touch screen square box tonal adjust feature does not work in Pano like the default Apple camera app. Retinal resolution compatibility is easy on your eyes with iPhone 4 models and Pano v_4.0.4. Hoping the iOS firmware upgrade to 4.1 and HDR will make Pano even better. Would be great to see some Photoshop tips from Pano developers on repairing the frame seams that sometimes appear on Panoramas that did not merge well. Still giving this app 4 out of 5 stars in my Apple Store review.
iPhoto Photography to WordPress Photo Gallery
iPhone camera to WordPress photo gallery
The best photography happens for me when I carry a small camera in my pocket at all times. The camera chip on my older iPhone was horrible and I deemed it unacceptable. The new camera chip (5 mega pixel) included within the iPhone 4 motivated me to upgrade from my older iPhone. A secondary goal was to eliminate my point and shoot Canon Powershot camera and carry just one camera; in my phone. I have always liked my Powershot, but having a decent camera integrated into a smart phone is just so much more practical and convenient when you want to travel simple and light. The whole process of getting pictures online can be accomplished with one device now. This post covers how I take iPhone pictures and upload them into a WordPress site with a NextGen photo gallery.
Here are the challenges: You have a bunch of trip pics that need to be uploaded, possibly image enhanced, resolution corrected, add a text image description, and finally, thumb-nailed and sorted within a photo gallery on a WordPress post or page. You might not have a computer or a wifi connection, and maybe you want to upload additional pics to your photo gallery as your trip progresses. The following process is how I get my photos online into my WordPress trip post.
Before I leave on a trip, I create a standard WordPress post for my trip. I also create a Nextgen photo gallery for my trip. Next, I embed the NextGen photo gallery into my WordPress post. Initially, I might not have any images for my photo gallery. As I start accumulating photos of my trip, I upload my desired images to my WordPress server and FTP them into the desired NextGen gallery folder (yourdomain.com/wp-content/gallery/mytripfolder/). The only step I need to do in the WordPress/NextGen admin is to have the NextGen plugin scan for any new images uploaded recently. NextGen will scan my gallery folder for new pictures; resizing them, and creating the necessary gallery thumbnail images.
Below is a NextGen photo gallery of pics all taken with the iPhone 4 camera. If I need a wide angle shot, I use the Pano iPhone application. Pano can stitched together multiple pictures to create the wide panorama pictures you see in the gallery. The iPhone’s camera lens is flat and not optically adjustable, so the zooming function is created digitally; which usually results in poor image quality.
With the iPhone’s high resolution retina technology it is actually possible to do some image correction functions from the iPhone’s small but very crisp display. If I have an image that needs some tonal adjustment, cropping, or sharping, I can make those adjustments with my finger with Adobe’s Photoshop Mobile application. I have found that many of my iPhone’s images do not need much digital correction.
My images were uploaded from my iPhone’s camera roll with an application called FTP on the Go. This was the best uploading application with many FTP functions; including the ability to change image sizes and adjust server file permissions. It also works over Wifi, 3G, and Edge networks.
There are other options to get your iPhone pictures to your WordPress site. WordPress for iOS is an iPhone app that allows posting and uploading of pictures to a post. But the WordPress for iOS app can’t match NextGen when it comes to organizing and displaying multiple photos within a blog post.
Note: The pictures below were taken with iOS 4.01. Since then Apple has released version 4.1 which includes the HDR photography feature. HDR supposedly deals with pictures with varying light intensities and takes three pictures and combines the best areas of each of those adjusted shots. Ever taken a shot with a washed-out sky? This technology deals with those kind of challenging shots. I will experiment with HDR as soon as my jail broken phone allows me to update to iOS 4.1.
Iphone Webpage
iPhone WordPress App
If your eyes have already glossed over stop reading, it only gets worse. So if you’re still with me read on for the specifics.
All of components of my bike tour update were produced with WordPress-related tools. The WordPress blog post initially gets created on my iPhone with the WordPress iPhone application. I can also monitor the post comments with this same application.
The ever-expanding photo gallery you see at the bottom of the post’s text is a WordPress plugin called nextGen. Any pic I upload to the nextGen gallery automatically gets thumbnailed and added to the gallery of trip thumbnail pics you see.
You may have noticed that many of my pics are panoramic in width. These pics are taken with an application called Pano. This app really helps with the limits of the iphone’s non adjustable lense. Pano sews all the small frame pictures together to create nicer landscape shots.
The Google map with my route gets created with umapper which is also a WordPress plugin. This umapper map has a KML file associated with it and has the map overlay content you see (overnight locations, route GPS points, etc). The future plan for the map will be for GPS points to be received from Twitter posts with geo-tagging data. Any Twitter post hashtagged with #spain_route_gps would be added to the existing map. So the map would update itself whenever I want to Twitter a GPS point.
The neat thing about the update page is that it is entirely created and updated from an iphone anywhere during the bike trip.
Recent Comments