The rest of the photos, including the ones in the video above are on Blakepics, where you can also find a full quality version of this video. The music for this one is an acoustic version of “My Heroine” by Silverstein.

I’m releasing the updated module for Gallery2 under the name of GalleryTweet. It was prompted by a few people mentioning they couldn’t get my earlier hack to work – so I thought I’d build something that was (slightly) more robust, and might stand to work on installations other than my own.

You might want to skip my ramblings and jump straight to the download, so here’s a link for you folks:

• Download GalleryTweet module
  

1. Install by unzipping to the root of your Gallery2 installation, and activate through the plugins panel.
   
2. Once logged in, edit your Twitter settings through the left navigation
   
3. You should enter your twitter username / password, and the format you’d like to send your Tweets out with.
   
4. Now while you’re browsing the Gallery, Tweet about any images using the link below the thumbnail

Please drop me a message on Twitter @kevinblake if you’ve found the plugin useful, can’t get it work, or have any other feedback.  That download link again, in case you missed it the first time:

• Download GalleryTweet module

Happy Tweeting!

This post is no longer being maintained due to budget constraints - please check the project page for the latest information: http://codex.gallery2.org/Gallery2:Modules:gallerytweet

The Hudson River picture wouldn’t have been possible without the non-affiliated TwitPic – which never truly got the recognition it deserved.  Without it, the infamous picture would have only been a 140 character description, and nobody will have noticed or cared.  Still, that’s the nature of buzzwords I guess.  If they don’t cause a buzz, they’re just words.

Anyway, TwitPic is yet another disparate service like Flickr, Panoramio or Facebook that’s had me tempted away from uploading some of my photos to Gallery2 / Blakepics.  With Facebook, I’ve integrated my own application there; Panoramio and Flickr, stolen the best parts of each.

And now with a hack to the tagging module in Gallery 2 I can emulate all I want from TwitPic as well, and tuck another service onto the shelf at the back at the cupboard.  So as usual, I thought I’d share.

What it is…

• Tweet any photos on Gallery just by adding the tag ‘twitter’ to your photo.
• Automatically takes the photos title as your Tweet text.
• Processes all URLs through TinyURL, giving you a warm and fuzzy Tiny URL

What it isn’t…

• A seamless Gallery2 module.  There’s some hacking to do.
• Multi-user.  If you share your Gallery, there’s some more work to do.

If you make improvements in these areas or any others – please let me know

Requirements

• Gallery 2
• Tagging module
• Twitter account

Things you need to do

1. Download my Twitter Tags class
2. Unzip to the root of your Gallery installation
3. Edit /modules/tags/classes/TwitterTag.class with your twitter username/pass, and Gallery URL.
4. Edit /modules/tags/classes/TagsHelper.class
   1. Add this just above the line ‘class TagsHelper’
      GalleryCoreApi::requireOnce('modules/tags/classes/TwitterTag.class');
   2. Then just above
      return TagsHelper::assignTagById($itemId, $tagId);
      Add
      TwitterTag::Tweet($itemId, $tagId);
5. Tag any photos you want to appear on Twitter with ‘twitter’.

Fortunately, BBC News have now deemed New Years Resolutions to be bad for your health.  So like bread, second-hand smoke, guilt and vitamins, I’ve given them up.

But I thought to myself, “I’ve been captioning loads of photos every week”.  I did.  “I bet it’s the rest of those free-loaders not pulling their weight”.  So I’ve given the Caption Status page on Blakepics a much-needed overhaul.  If you’re logged in, you’ll now see how you’re doing with captioning your own photos – and even if you’re not, you can see a member list with how many photos everyone’s captioned, as well as click-through to a list of them all.

Turns out I was wrong.  A lot of those free-loaders are doing a better job than me.  In fact, whilst 25.01% of total photos are captioned – 25.04% of my own photos are captioned.  Since most of them on there are mine, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

So it seems as though I can’t prove everything with statistics.  Not if that something is how successful my 2008 Resolution has been.

Happy New Year Everyone!

The rest of the photos, including the ones in the video above are on Blakepics, where you can also find a full quality version of this video. The music for this one in case you’re interested, is “Easier to Lie” by Aqualung, inspired by a recent episode of Lead Balloon.

The rest of the photos, including the ones in the video above will be on Blakepics shortly (as soon as I’ve got my server running again). Likewise, a full quality version of the video will be here. The music, “Let me be myself” by 3 Doors Down.

Incidentally, more blog posts from the trip are also on the way. Some are drafts, some are notes, some probably don’t exist yet – but they’ll be spreading across the site like mould on bread very shortly.

* You have invited Alison to start viewing webcam. Please wait for a response or Cancel (Alt+Q) the pending invitation.
Alison says (22:21):
you doing something kinky?

I’m not sure where I got this undeserved reputation from, personally. But anyway, if you’d like to try this yourself, it’s compatible with all kinds of Symbian S60 phones, so head over to motvik’s web site and download wwigo. It’s free, and it’s cool – what else could you ask for?

It’s become a bit of a theme this year, and after my last posts on the subject – we got to talking about captioning photos. Many of my photos exist on the basis of seeing something shiny, and then taking a picture. I often have no idea what said shiny thing was – but quite often make the effort usually on Google, or Rough Guides to discover its secrets afterwards.

I encourage any account holders to tag as many photos as they want on Blakepics. But mine is a very small community, and Flickr shadows it with even its tiniest fingernail. So, why should you have to tag your own photos? Aren’t there plenty of other people out there that would do that for you?

And I got thinking about the recaptcha project. They use scans of words to present the user with captchas that will help their digitization of old texts. These “unknowns” are combined with”known” text, and the answers compared against previous users results.

So, why not the same for photos? A known photo could be presented to the user “Dog”, “Cat”, “Llama”, or even a traditional captcha. Combine that with an unknown photo, and invite users to give it a caption. According to recaptcha, there are 60 million captchas being solved every day – it’s about time we put all that to good use.

Or perhaps CAPTCHA might just become another word for blackmail. Sure, you can login to your account – but you have to do something for me first. I just like the way Captchaner, sounds (Captcha, Captioner – see what I did there?). Maybe one day we’ll see this on all of our logins.

That said, I think I often miss out on some of the more social aspects of photography that networks like Flickr, or Facebook provide. So personally, I’m looking forward to the Windows release of this product so I can try it out for myself. Have any of you Mac users out there tried PictureSync? What did you think?

1. I’m very lazy.
2. I have far too many photos.
3. I put far too many of them on-line.
4. Captioning photos on Gallery2 is harder than it should be.

Well, one of my new years resolutions last year was “caption more photos”, and without any specific goals – I can say I succeeded tremendously. So this year I thought I’d quantify it so I can feel ever warmer, fuzzier and smug that I fulfilled an ambition for 2008. So I’m aiming to have captions on a massive 35% of them by years end (that’s a minimum of 2,500 more photos), and to help – I’ve armed Blakepics.com with a whole new module. I think I’m finally starting to get to grips with at least some of the Gallery2 API.

So if you have an account on Blakepics.com, you can help out by using this new method of adding captions to your photos. Whenever you’re viewing an album you own or have permissions for (and you’re signed-in of course), you’ll notice a new box called “Change Title” below each thumbnail. Just type your new title into that and click the icon to the right, or just hit enter. The image title will be updated without any reloading the page, or taking you to new forms. Which is especially cool if you’re just browsing the photos and want to quickly update something.

I’ve found it a huge improvement, even over bulk-edit – but please let me know your thoughts. And if you’re interested in this module for your own Gallery, please get in touch. It might not be ready for distribution, but I’m happy to hear from any willing beta testers.