Monday, March 19, 2007

One million geolocated photos at Panoramio

Some days ago Panoramio reached the magic number of one million geolocated photos. Thanks to the most wonderful community of users around the World now our planet is pretty much illustrated.

Since we launched the site in October 2005, 300.000 people have signed up at Panoramio. On February more than 4 million unique visitors came to Panoramio and made 30 million page views. As you can imagine all that traffic made our little team extremely busy, specially the last three months. At this graphic you can get an idea of the huge growth of the site since December:

Panoramio on Alexa

Joaquín Cuenca has been working very hard optimizing our two servers with great results. Now even at traffic peaks the site downloads at a nice speed. We are doubling our servers right now, we want to be ready for future increases.

Together with the traffic avalanche we received lots of e-mails from the users reporting bugs, questions or requesting features. We replied personally to more than 99% of the e-mails, but if for whatever reason we missed yours, please send it again, we will try to do better this time. Those e-mails provided us with very useful information to fix some hard to find bugs and make the site overall more usable.

Panoramio is now translated to 8 new languages: Bulgarian (Andrey Kirkov and Boyan Ivanov Bonev), Norwegian (Bo Eide), Greek (Tasos & Kostas Koutsavlis), Finnish (Timo Rossi), Slovenian (Nina Litrop), Brazilian Portuguese (Sergio de Castro and Cleber Lima), Persian (Hessam Moosavi) and Traditional Chinese (David Hing Cheong Hung). It is a very nice feeling knowing that many people can enjoy Panoramio in their own language.

In my previous post I spoke about new features coming. The first one available is the "popular" tab at Panoramio map where you can see a selection of the best photos ordered by popularity. We lost hours looking at them.

You will see many new features the next weeks.

23 comments:

  1. Yay finally the update


    You guys rock!

    Maybe you guys should add a feature so we can select ( users) our favorite pictures, and those will appear on Google Earth... Because 100 pictures on the Eiffel Tower could be bad :S

    ReplyDelete
  2. Holla at'cha boyz!

    Your project is wonderful!
    By the way, what about new Google Earth update?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Ben,

    Thanks for the suggestion. We already use the information from the favorites to select the photos that appear in the tab "popular" and therefore in Google Earth. Anyway you are right, having too many photos of a single place doesn't help very much.

    Eduardo

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  4. Hola, me llamo Rafael y mi sorpresa al entrar en el blog y ver que todo está en inglés, más que sorpresa, podría considerarla una gran decepción.

    "Mu bonico el inglés, y el turco, y el chino", pero Eduardo, muy decepcionante que todo, absolutamente todo, esté en inglés.

    Un saludo.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Guten Tag oder Guten Abend aus Niederkrüchten,
    mache gerade die ersten Versuche mit diesen tollen Seiten. Bin begeistert. Das Medium werde ich noch sehr oft nutzen.
    Viele Grüße an alle Nutzer.
    B.N.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Rafa,

    El sitio está traducido porque los textos son relativamente estáticos, no cambian con mucha frecuencia. Sin embargo el blog está cambiando todo el tiempo y puesto que los traductores son voluntarios pedirles cada pocos días se pongan a traducir las nuevas entradas del blog me parece un tanto excesivo. Esa es la única razón de que el blog esté solo en inglés.

    Saludos

    Eduardo

    ReplyDelete
  7. Paulo Roberto WitoslawskiMarch 21, 2007 at 9:26 AM

    Olá!
    Adicionei minhas fotos no mês de março antes da atualização, no entanto elas não aparecem no Google Earth. Quando é que elas estarão disponíveis no Google Earth.
    Abraço
    Paulo Roberto

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hi,

    Great job, guys!

    I don't think that the choosing only popular photos for the Google Earth is a good solution. You'll end up with really good photos for popular places, but none for other places... I'd prefer to have one quality photo of each location regardless of the place they show (i.e. regardless of the popularity of the place).

    Also, I think there should be some instructions for users on how to geoposition the photos. A lot of time I find photos positioned at the place the photo was taken FROM rather than at the place it is on the picture (which could be in e.g. a case of a vulcano miles away).

    Best wishes for the future,
    Klaus.

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  9. Esou de acordo com o último comentário, lugares muito conhecidos ficam com tantas fotos que é até difícil clicar em uma, e outros lugares ficam quase sem foto, tambem tem o problema das fotos no lugar errado, já sugeri um novo lugar para duas delas mas até agora não trocaram.

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  10. Postei uma foto de Senador Canedo-Goiás-Brasil, e ainda não pude ve-la no Googleearth. É a primeira foto da região. Gostaria de saber se isto vai acontecer em breve?

    Grato!

    ReplyDelete
  11. Hi guys, at first view google earth is intriguing, but the onehundredandfirst photo of a well known place is nothing but boring. It is seemingly impossible to find the best photos of a particular place. However, in my belief such a possibility would enhance your site doubtlessly. Another aspekt is the position of photos marked. For instance in a wide landscape the place where the photo was taken is in my opinion the only relevant spot. From there the photographer saw what the viewer is looking at.
    Best regards and great success

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  12. Great job guys! I can see my photos in Google Earth now. But i have one complain, why does my photos not always appear? There is only one photo, in my photo's location, so i hope it will appear easily without covered by any other photos, but it is not.

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  13. Love this, I'm so busy tagging things, but have not figured a lot of it out yet. Too bad the city we live in is not focused properly, will these be fixed someday? It's so much fun revisiting the places we've been, and finding new and interesting place to put on our wish-list of future visits! thanX

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  14. Hello World!!!!
    Thanks for Panaramio from Tajikistan.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Hi, great that Norwegian language is finally up and running on Panoramio! But can I just make a quick comment on one of the words: It should be "mer" (English: more), not "mere" (doesn't actually mean anything in writing). The last one is dialect, not approved for writing. Also it looks strange for everyone else who doesn't have that dialect. Usually I wouldn't even bother commenting on it but it's a word that appears on every single page so I'm getting kind of annoyed by it.

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  16. No acabo de entender el criterio por el cual unas fotos salen y otras no. Creía comprender que no salían aquellas en que claramente el protagonista es alguien en particular pero no el lugar, sin embargo encuentro fotos en que no es así

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  17. Fantasticna ideja !!
    Foto by Nenad 1976 pokazuje najlepsu plazu na Adriatiku- Zanjic Montenegro
    Bravo Nenad

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  18. The idea with photos, seems good, but not when you visit the place outside of Saint-Augustin church in Paris, and can find four markers for Panoramio pictures:
    1. Royan(17) --- showing a coastline somewhere
    2. IMG_6862-1 --- showing the actual church
    3. Airside Zurich Center Airport --- probably at the airport in Zurich
    4. 20051022 Paris - Place St Augustin - Jeanne d´Arc ---- probably actual

    Are there no checking done when a picture is published ????

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  19. I'd like to suggest you appoint a team of moderators from your membership to oversee the photos before they are sent to Google.
    You would need an enormous number of staff to do this work which volunteers with local knowledge could do better for free.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Muchas felicidades por el éxito tan grande y el logro de un proyecto de tal trascendencia. Me siento honrado de formar parte de Panoramio!!
    Sigan adelante!!
    Roberto

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  21. Congrats!

    The way we solved the overload problem on http://www.grapheety.com is that we only have the 8 newest posts on any given view. We also have a rating system so as it gets populated we will filter out inappropriate content. You can page down into them, but this gets the most up to date view. And if you want more details, you can keep zooming in. Also we have a filter much like iTunes so you can quickly drill down to the relevant information: "Eiffel Tower", etc.

    I really like your site though, great work teaming up with Google.

    ReplyDelete
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    ReplyDelete