Cannot Enable PicLens in my gallery!!!

[yardbird]

So is this active yet? I am like that annoying kid in the car who's going to keep asking Is it done yet? Is it done yet?

[bobt54]

It isn't a blow up of the thumbnail that we'll be doing. It'll pull the medium or the large or the original, depending on the server load and size of the original.
Now I haven't looked around at other photo-hosting sites, will PBase be the only photo-sharing site to give the gallery owner the choice of whether PicLens works on their galleries or not?

Thanks for the clarification of this misconception with the blurry pictures! I guess if you have blurry pics on your site, then the PicLens pics will also be blurry, but if you have good quality ones then they will look good also in PicLens. Think not of images flying all over the place Pinemikey, but rather try to imagine walking along a wall watching a photo art exhibition, stopping and looking closer at some photos that interest you more. That is the feeling I get when using PicLens.

Sorry, I don't really know Nooutet if the gallery owners on the other PicLens enabled sites can turn it on and off. I have no galleries on any of them, sticking to just PBase so far.

Zevs

I have galleries on Flickr and Picasa and I didn't have to do a thing. I think Flickr did a good job with it, but I am not happy with how Picasa handled it. Picasa simply grabs all the images on the page including the thumbnails of other users who have commented or I have as friends. It sounds like Nooutlet is doing it right.

You get blurry images when Piclens grabs everything on the page including tiny thumbnail images. Larger images display just fine.

I am all in favor of having another way of displaying my images provided it doesn't screw up the system.

What I am curious about is how is Cooliris making money on any of this? Will we start to see ads in with our pictures at some point in time?

[nooutlet]

It's possible that Flickr and/or Picasa didn't have to implement PicLens themselves. CoolIris made Piclens work with certain sites automatically. I know how PicLens knows what pictures to display and it seems impossible that the people programming Picasa would program it to stick every image on any given page into the RSS feed that PicLens reads.
As per your question of the business end of PicLens, slug wondered the same thing so I asked the guy that contacted me. It sounded like ad space would eventually be sold.

[bobt54]

All of the thumbnails pictured here show up in the Piclens stream on my Picasa page.

[nooutlet]

I believed that it grabs pictures that would obviously not be part of what you want. I'm saying that the fact that that happens is good evidence that the Picasa people didn't actually have to implement PicLens themselves because they wouldn't have done that. In order to implement PicLens, you have to have a link to a file that looks something like this:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>
<title>so-and-so's gallery</title>
<link>gallery page url?</link>
<atom:link rel='previous' href='link to a previous page if the PicLens gallery is paginated'/>
<atom:link rel='next' href='link to the next page if the PicLens gallery is paginated'/>
<item>
<title>image #1 title</title>
<link>image #1 link</link>
<guid>image #1 id? I don't know what the purpose is</guid>
<media:thumbnail url="the full thumbnail url" type="image/jpeg" />
<media:content url="the full high quality image url" type="image/jpeg" />
</item>
<item>
<title>image #2 title</title>
<link>image #2 link</link>
<guid>image #2 id? I don't know what the purpose is</guid>
<media:thumbnail url="the full thumbnail url" type="image/jpeg" />
<media:content url="the full high quality image url" type="image/jpeg" />
</item>
<item>
<title>image #3 title</title>
<link>image #3 link</link>
<guid>image #3 id? I don't know what the purpose is</guid>
<media:thumbnail url="the full thumbnail url" type="image/jpeg" />
<media:content url="the full high quality image url" type="image/jpeg" />
</item>
</channel>
</rss>


To grab pictures that aren't part of the gallery is more difficult from the back-end. You'd have to have one query that selects pictures in the gallery as well as a query to grab pictures set as avatars of friends that are displayed on any given page. It would be more work(a lot more work) to grab those avatars from behind the scenes. What is more likely is that PicLens automatically looks for image files that are displayed on the page and puts all images it finds into the PicLens browser. But that's not at all how it works when the website owner has to enable PicLens to work on their website.

[dougj]

The PBase developers should start a few more projects and work on them simultaneously, this will further delay completion of anything. Oh, and make sure a few users that post in the forums are the sole source for identifying all of these top priorities. I simply cannot believe this place - there clearly is zero accountability and no plan.

[bobt54]

We haven't picked at this scab in a while. Any more news on how this is progressing? Is there an ETA on this feature?

[erndog66]

I am ready for this option. Turn it on. Those of us in this forum would like it as an option...no need to post negatives here. For those who choose not to use it, don't. Create another forum for an enhancement you would like.

[erichmangl]

I didn't realize we were going to go live with that page. So yeah enabling PicLens on that page won't do anything until gallery pages have the PicLens code that checks to see if PicLens is enabled and then gives an RSS feed for PicLens to read. Also, the checkbox doesn't stay checked because the database doesn't have a spot for that flag yet.

NoOutlet

why not hide the piclens-thingie on the "plugins"-page if it is not working ? does not need more than /* and */ in the coding and people will not be confused

[alexis]

I have personally given up hoping that PBASE will EVER implement this fantastic add-on. I have also given up recommending to friends to subscribe to Pbase because it is no longer a market keader or contender - flickr is the way to go if you are just starting out. Me, the only reason I am staying is because I have been a customer from the early days and managed to secure a good Pbase url - other than that PBAse feels very tired indeed

[clubtad]

I was hoping to renew my account. Maybe next month

[soenda]

There are a number of people who have weighed in as not wanting Piclens. I'm not particularly interested in having my photos zoom by at a second apiece on anybody's screen. One of the pbase programmers has explained on this and other threads some of the challenges that adding Piclens entails. It's a major project that something less than everyone wants.

Pbase is in better shape than a number of people seem to think. One analytics website puts Pbase's average daily number of people---visitors, not visits---at between 135K and 250K for the past six months. Traffic per month averaged 4,355,247 people who made 7,269,514 visits. Pbase must be doing something right.

Somehow it seems unlikely that Piclens will be moved to the top of the Pbase priority list on the strength of a limited number of people threatening to leave.

[dougj]

I prefer PBase fix the broken 'core' stuff before adding new features on top of the pile, just my 2 cents.

[clubtad]

It still won't enable on my account.

[orio]

I am unable to enable it.