Spam comment

Spam bots found panoye.com... A bunch of spam mails has passed the spam protection system (captcha) on the site today :( I deleted all spam comments, but some users received emails about new comments.

Sorry for the inconvenience...

For the moment -- anonymous comments are disabled.

Popular panoramas on homepage

Just added a new feature on the homepage: the list of the most popular panoramas in the last 30 days. This list is calculated not only on votes but also with the number of pageviews and comments.

PS. Older homepage layouts

The panoramic collection of the Library of the Congress

If you think panoramic photography is possible only because of modern stitching software, digital cameras and wide-angle lenses - you are wrong... The first recorded panoramic photo was taken 165 years ago: in 1843. It was made with special cameras (called panoramic cameras, of course ;) and exposed with the daguerreotype technique.

This short introduction is here because I found this cool site with hundreds of old panoramas from the USA. It is the "The panoramic collection of the Library of the Congress" and it contains around four thousand panoramic photos! Here are just a few, enjoy:

PS. No new features on panoye.com this week... We are too busy preparing our wedding (next month ;)

Weekend upgrade

Just a few changes, but it took me two three days to upgrade. Here they are:

• SEO friendly links (for example, panoye.com/panorama.356-libourne-bridge-hdr.html instead of panoye.com/panorama-show.356.html)
• Images for java applet viewer (see the forum post for more info)
• ...and a few more minor enhancements...

Also, I changed the max file size to 1mb (from 2mb).

2mb images were too big for javascript viewer -- the image had to be resized after uploading. Since there were problems even with java viewer -- now four image resizes have to be made after uploading your panorama... One for javascript viewer, and one for java/applet, one for the thumbnail, and one for the mini-thumbnail. And that takes too long -- for some images 10-15 seconds!

Panoye in google earth

The google earth file with all the panoramas from panoye can be downloaded here. You can see the panoramas in google maps, also.

Planets

Here is one:

At the moment, panoye supports three types of panoramas:

• Partial (they cover less than 360°)
• Cylindrical panoramas (360° horizontal, but less than 180° vertical)
• Spherical (360° horizontal and 180° vertical)

My question is -- add Planet panoramas to panoye?

Of course, planet will not be visible with javascript and java viewers. Just images. There probably won't be many planets -- since they are harder to make than normal panoramas (at least cylindrical, if you have a spherical panorama -- planet is just few more mouse clicks).

But planets are cool, aren't they? ;)