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Live Publishing of Photos – Gregory Cam

In 2007, I began publishing photos from my iPhone to a gallery on the Internet that I called my Live Feed. This capability was made available by using the Gallery feature provided by the .Mac (“dot mac”) service from Apple.

As of January 2008, I have switched to using Blogger (a Google service) as my method of posting live photos to the web. I call it Gregory Cam. Using blogger for posting a live feed of photos resolves numerous problems I was experiencing with the Apple gallery feature (see list below).

Problems with Apple Gallery. Here is a short list of the problems I discovered with the Gallery feature offered by Apple:

  • Slow. Visitors to the gallery would need to wait for all photos on a particular page to load. This was somewhat time consuming depending on the speed of their Internet connection.
  • Sorting Problems. Sometimes a photo would get “stuck” as the first photo of the gallery and the only way to fix that was to use iPhoto to delete that photo since trying to reorganize the photos didn’t seem to fix the problem. Because iPhoto is required to correct problems with the gallery feature, it is necessary to carry a notebook around in case a problem comes up. However, one must use the iPhoto program on the computer that was originally used to create the gallery. No other computer will offer access to the original gallery.
  • Gallery Creation. Galleries must first be created on an Apple desktop or notebook computer. Only then can the iPhone send photos to the gallery. The iPhone can’t create a gallery and galleries can’t be created or managed on the web.
  • Duplicates. Sometimes duplicate photos would appear in the gallery. The only way to fix this would be to use iPhoto on the computer that was originally used to create the gallery and manually delete the duplicates.
  • No Date/Time Stamp. The gallery doesn’t automatically provide a date and time stamp. So, it was necessary to manually type the date and time along with a description when publishing photos.
  • Truncated Descriptions. The gallery provides only a short line of text for a description of each photo. The description is truncated (shortened) in the default viewing mode.
  • No External Navigation. Sending someone to a gallery page would leave them on a web page with no navigation method for reaching other destinations of interest because the gallery pages are not editable.
  • Not Open Source. Because it is only possible to create and manage a gallery using Apple and iPhoto, the galleries are not openly accessible from any other platform such as Linux or Windows.

All of the problems identified above were resolved when switching to Blogger for live photo publishing. To publish a photo to Blogger, simply enable the e-mail feature found under Settings > Email. From an iPhone or any camera equipped phone, e-mail a photo. With the iPhone it is also possible to include further writing with the photo. Text included with a photo (in the body of the e-mail) will get published along with the photo.

By Greg Johnson

Greg Johnson is a freelance writer and tech consultant in Iowa City. He is also the founder and Director of the ResourcesForLife.com website. Learn more at AboutGregJohnson.com