Questions about photos for POIs

[EFletcher]

1. I'm in the process of creating a guide, and would like to be able to use the "Create POI from Uploaded Picture" function. When it is clicked, the options are to "show all nearby media" or "show only my media." However, the latter just shows pictures I have already uploaded, and does not provide me with the means to upload new photos. Would it be possible to add a Browse button? If not, how would I go about uploading all of the pictures I plan to use so I can select them from this dialog? (The only ones that show now are ones I've uploaded for earlier POIs.)

2. There is no obvious way to control the sequence of photos within a POI. I have a POI with 3 photos, but it is displaying them in a west-to-east sequence instead of the time-based sequence I would expect from the EXIF data. Perhaps a solution would be to allow an author to drag and drop them into the desired sequence.

As a general question about strategy for a guide, will geotagged photos appear automatically in the right spot (as they do for trails)? I am unclear about the relationship between a POI and the photos associated with it. During the editing they seem to be part of a POI, but if the pictures are not all take at the same place, will that conflict with how they are displayed on a guide on a GPS-equipped PDA? For example, if a POI mentioned that several different species of wildlife may be seen along a section of a trail, the various photos may be spread out along that section.

[chris]

The create POI from uploaded picture is a bit misleading, it means create a POI from an already uploaded picture, so that you can pin point the POI using the lat/lon from the picture. If you want to upload pictures, you need to first create the POI (and the pictures will be tagged at the POIs location).

2. right now there is no way to order the photos, but this is something we will be working on soon.

All pictures in a POI will be displayed as belonging to that POI on the map, that is, they are not shown in their individual locations, but grouped together. We still save the locations of each of the pictures if they are separate from that of the POI

[EFletcher]

Okay, thanks Chris.

It would be nice to be able to upload the whole set of pictures for a guide, then be able to associate them to POIs (or choose a photo for a POI and have the geo info in the EXIF provide the location).

[chris]

If there is EXIF information in the photo we will use that, but if it is not present, then we assign it to the location of the POI (you can always manually change the location of the photo by going to my photos).

[mildewproduction]

I agree with EFletcher that it would useful to create a POI by uploading a picture and have the guide auto place the POI according to the photo's GPS information.

For instance I did some driving trips in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and I wasn't tracking the driving portions only the hikes. However, I could build some nice guides for the driving sections. Now I have to go in and trace my trip along the road, which isn't a problem. The more difficult part is placing the photos at the right location. I now have to research other people's maps to try and figure out where exactly they were taken.

I suppose a work around is to use Create a Trip with the photos first, and then write the guide. Maybe that is what you want us to do anyway.

[chris]

When we first launched guides the idea was that users would use their existing uploaded data and restructure it in a way that is more meaningful for other users. More recently, we have found that people want to create guides using media and information not previously uploaded to EveryTrail, so these suggestions seem a lot more relevant now.

It should be fairly easy to implement, I will look into it.