April's update postponed and some other issues

Unfortunately due to technical issues the April's update of Panoramio photos in Google Earth has been postponed to the end of May. The last weekly update was on April 25th adding photos up to ID 20980000 to Google Earth. The difference between the weekly update and the monthly one is that new added photos are displayed only in very low zoom levels in the weekly update. You have to wait until the next monthly update to see photos in different zoom levels according to popularity.

We added a new question to the Help page called "Spam in comments". The idea is to discourage campaigns of comments for the Panoramio contest. Sending hundreds of comments with links is simply spam. If you get spam I recommend you to add a comment to one photo of the spammer including a link to that question. Normally after receiving one or two comments the user doesn't spam anymore. This solution is far from perfect, but in the near future we will add a way to report comments and block users that abuse comment. By the way, this new policy starts now, so it doesn't apply for comments made before May 7th.

I also would like to clarify that the final winners of the contest are only the ones included after the announcement in the blog. The contest page might be technically available before the announcement, but we always need some extra time for technical tasks and verifications.

Winners of Panoramio Contest of March 2009

Here are the winners of the Panoramio monthly Contest for March 2009 edition. Those photos were uploaded in March and voted in April. The sponsor ATP (Mike Chean) will contact the winners via e-mail during the next 30 days in order to send the prizes.

First Prize of Scenery category

taken in India by bimands

First Prize of Heritage category

taken in Brazil by R & F Faraon

First Prize of Travel category

taken in Poland by Ula Ch-L

First Prize of Unusual Location category

taken in Argentina by mslp

Full list of winners

Congratulations!