Best 2009 panoramas

The 2009. year is near its end. It was an interesting one on Panoye - lots of new users, lots of nice panoramas...

So I decided to make a small "best of" list of this year's panoramas. You can see the list here Best panoramas of 2009. The list is not yet finished, the order can still be changed, new popular panoramas could be uploaded.

For now,  lets enjoy a few older panoramas. Here is the "best of 2008" list:

1. DMC II 2700m Alpe d'Huez Resort:

Panoramic made at 2700m at Alpes d'Huez Ski Resort in Alps, France, near arrival of DMC II lift. You can see Quicktime VR version here http://www.skivr.com/?p=9 I'm very interested by all feedbacks and suggestions to help me as I'm brand new beginner :D
© vincen

2. Las Ramblas Centro. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.:

Centro Comercial recien abierto al público.
© Bermudez

3. Standing on the Aircraft Carrier board in ShenZhen:

Many people know Aircraft Carrier only by photos."A big guy it was." But Standing on the Aircraft Carrier board is not easy. Much things you must to overcome. If you have chance or not is very important. OK,now good chance is coming. You can be standing on the Aircraft Carrier,really? True,just follow me to realize this dream! Welcome to the Minsk World-Russian Aircraft Carrier Museum Shenzhen! Just enjoy!
© twsmd2008

4. Forum in Roma:

Forum in Roma (pictures taken in february 2008)
© vincen

5. Lac Blanc Fontbelle in Alpe d'Huez:

View of Alpe d'Huez Resort Picture taken between Lac Blanc ski lift and Fontbelle chairlift
© vincen

6. Château Malou:

Le Château Malou est une belle propriété néoclassique édifiée en 1776 au sein d'un parc splendide par le négociant bruxellois Lambert de Lamberts.
© ecrabbe

7. Pinar de Tamadaba. Gran Canaria:

Esta es la zona de acampada de LLano de la Mimbre, en el pinar de Tamadaba. Este pinar se encuentra en el mucipio de Agaete, Gran Canaria.
© Bermudez

8. Las Cañadas del Teide. Isla de Tenerife. :

Podemos contemplar desde este mirador, El Roque Cinchado, El Pico más alto de España El Teide (3718 metros) y todo a nuestro alrededor, Las Cañadas del Teide. Isla de Tenerife. Canarias. españa
© Bermudez

9. Antiguo Balneario en el barranco de Azuaje:

Este balneario en ruinas se encuentra en el barranco de Azuaje. Gran Canaria. El lugar es impresionante.
© Bermudez

10. Presa de Las Niñas, Gran Canaria:

Vista de todo el embalse de la presa de las Niñas. Isla de Gran Canaria. Islas Canarias. España.
© Bermudez

Panoye in Google Chrome

Google just released (finally!) the Linux version of its browser Chrome:

For those using Chrome - there was a small bug while scrolling the panorama. The bug is resolved now.

Panoye framework

A few month ago I decided to go open source. Not all of the code from Panoye, only one part - the framework. So, if you want to take a look on this code, search for bugs, you can download it here: http://code.google.com/p/panoye-f/.

The framework consists of PHP scripts and classes which are not specific to Panoye and can be used for any PHP5 powered site.

The most important technical details od panoye-f framework are:

• Small and lightweight,
• It has its own ORM (Object Relation Mapping) classes,
• Code creation (ORM and CRUD) from database tables,
• Filesystem (gzipped) caching for pages,
• Automatic class loading (no need to import, require or require_once),
• Unit testing,
• Lots of utility classes (Strings, RSSBuilder, SitemapBuilder, HtmlLexer, ...),
• Sql, DbIterator and AppObject, Date and Timestamp classes fordatabase programming and ORM,
• Automatic creation of search engine friendly links for objects in database.
  
• Etc.

Panoye @ FriendFeed

New FriendFeed feed for Panoye. If you are a FF user - feel free to follow us at friendfeed.com/panoye.

Partial panoramas orientation

This is a response to a question asked by gopanthers - Orientation Failure results in No Panoramas Saved. The problem is the orientation of partial panoramas.

After you selected your panorama type to be partial - the next thing to do is - orientation. First of all, let us suppose the panorama in question is this one:

...and let's suppose, the position on the map is:

First of all, unlike the "full" cylindrical panorama - partial panoramas cover only part of the field of view around the location. For example, the field of view of our panorama is...

Now, the proccess of orientation consists of finding the directions of the left and right directions on the panorama:

On the map:

So, now you should click twice on the map. First click anywhere on the line marked "left", and second click anywhere on the line "right". The order (first left) is important! After the second click on the map you should be automatically redirected to the finished panorama. Note that the left and right lines are not visible - you must imagine them on the map.

And, of course, if the resulting panorama orientation is not correct - just click "Edit" (on the page with your panorama, below the map) skip the first two steps and try your orientation again.

Panoye, twitter & twitterboard [testing]

Testing the twitterboard widget. Just to see if it is interesting to panoye users...

PS.Just in case you didn't know, panoye is on Twitter. Feel free to follow ;)

Panoye.com in New Jersey!

Liveblogging the process of moving to a new server for panoye.com:

• Monday, Jun 22. Started at cca 06:00 (GMT)
• Restored all files, database
• Changed DNS entries
• Waiting for DNS to refresh...
• Testing:
  
  • Registering new users
  • Upload panoramas (from file, from URL, from flickr)
  • Email
  • Twitter updates
  • ...etc... ;)
• Everything seems OK, so the site is now open to all (cca @ 15:30 GMT).

If you still se only a "Currently unavailable..." message - the problem is probably your internet provider's DNS servers that countain old data for panoye.com domain. This should be automatically reloaded in the following next 12 hours.

Panoye goes to New Jersey!

This weekend Panoye will move to a new server and new location. From Dallas (where it is located now) to New Jersey.

The site will be unavailable for 24-36 hours.

See updates here. 

Missing argument 2 ...

Thanks to Oscar Ibáñez who found this annoying bug that happened sometimes when uploading panoramas:

Warning: Missing argument 2 for Sql::setInt(), called in .../PanoramaTags.class.php on line 17 and defined in .../Sql.class.php on line 25 Page not found

The problem should be solved by now.

Thanks Oscar!

Viapará

Another very nice panoramic image from the archives, Bernie say Viapará is a...

...recreational place located between the Monsacro mountain and the Aramo range. To reach this place you must follow the road to Angliru, the (in)famous for being one of the most demanding climbs in professional road bicycle racing, having been used in the Vuelta a España stage race.

The pano:

...and another one..

Again and again. New version of Panoye is online. The biggest change is that now the urls look a different now.

Before:

www.panoye.com/panorama.2134.my-panorama.html
www.panoye.com/user/1234

Now it is

www.panoye.com/panorama/my-panorama.html
www.panoye.com/user/nick

Other than that - the bug in the orientation process should now be resolved.

More to come...

New version rolled out

The beta-testing phase of the new version of Panoye is now finished. There are only a few minor updates:

• The "Panorama uploaded" date for every panorama,
• "Google Earth" link (with the KML) file now opens in GE (Content-Type error),
• Link to the tutorials (autostitch, hugin and AutoPano Pro) for users who like panoramic photography but don't know how to stitch photos together,
  
• + few minor technical issues

More to come, of course :)

Panoramic images with Hugin

From Wikipedia:

hugin is a cross-platform open source panorama photo stitching program developed by Pablo d'Angelo and others. It is a GUI front-end for Helmut Dersch's Panorama Tools and Andrew Mihal's Enblend and Enfuse.

Unlike autostitch, hugin is a complex program with hundreds of options. In this quick tutorial I'll try to teach you only the basics of panorama-making with hugin.

So, let's start... When you run hugin for the first time you will see something like this:

There are many different ways to stitch a panorama in hugin. I'll continue with the easiest (at least for me) path: simple manual stitching.

Click the "Images" tab:

Select the "Add time series of images" button. Then select the images you made for your panorama:

Click on the "Camera and lens" tab and check if the settings for your camera/lenses are correct. It should be, if the EXIF data embeded with your digital photos are OK.

Click on the "Control points" tab:

Now you must find control points between neighbor images. At the top there is a list of all your images. We will start with the first and second. Select the "2" button on the right part of the screen, and the second image should be shown:

Now find the controll points (ie. same positions) on both images. First click on the left side, then on the same point in the second photo. The more controll points you find - the better your result will be. For this example, I tried to find three points:

After you've done for the first and second image click on the right arrow (top-right of the window) for the second and third images pair. And so on...

Note that, after you found your first control point, hugin sometimes try to guess the best point. Just double-click on your left image - and it will try to find the same position on the other side.

After you have finished with all your images - go to the "Optimiser" tab:

Click on "Optimise now". If everything went OK - you should see this dialog/message:

Click "Yes", of course ;)

Click on the "Preview" button in the toolbar (third from the right).

This is not the actual result, but just a quick view on how your pano will be after the stitching process. As you see, the pano is not straight. Click on the "Straighten" button in the toolbar:

...close the preview window, and then go to the "Stitcher" tab, the last one:

You can experiment with the options here, but most of the times - the default options should be OK. Click the "Stitch now!" button, and select the resulting file.

Open that file in a photo-editing application of you choice (here's GIMP)...

Crop the top and bottom part of the pano:

The last step is, of course... Upload and share your panoramic images on panoye! :)