Places

It’s the first big new feature since PicsEngine launched 20 days ago. Places is a great way to display your photos on a map and locate those that don’t have GPS coordinates yet. Here is a video to show you quickly what you can do with this new feature.

As you can see, you can drop photos or albums on the map to create new location spots. Also, if you are in another section (like the photos or in an album), you can drop photos on the Places tab on the left to locate them. When your photos are geolocated, their location can be displayed on Web photo galleries.

Improvements

Along with Places, PicsEngine has been improved in different ways :
- Progressive loading of photos (100 by 100). Really useful for large libraries. You don’t need to load the whole photo library anymore.
- Adding an album adds it below the selected album
- Improved the new gallery form with an URL field

- Search in the whole library, not only in loaded images
- Various UI improvements like drop icons and controls.

I hope you’ll enjoy these new features and tell me what you think !

As you may know, PicsEngine provides different versions of the photo galleries. Let’s explain them a bit.

Standard Version

This version is the standard you know. This version is displayed for most browsers : Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and IE8/9.
The UI is the same for every browsers but there are some features that slighly differ. For most recent browsers like Safari, it uses CSS3 transitions and properties like translate3d to have smoother animations. We are going to support more CSS3 properties as browsers will get them. Also, IE8 have different problems with PNG alpha animations so we disabled them in this browser.
This version is fully powered by Javascript, you will see different performances between IE and Safari for example.

Touch-Optimized Version

This version has the same code than the browser version but is optimized for large touch screen devices like the iPad. The UI slightly changes in some points like the scroll areas and the navigation through photos to support touch gestures. This version will probably be used for future tablet devices.

HTML Version

This version has been created for IE6, IE7 and search engines. It’s really simplist but you can browse albums and photos without any problem. It doesn’t use any Javascript to load pictures. Google will reference your gallery through this version.

Mobile Version

The Mobile version has been created for the iPhone and Android devices. It’s a version optimized for small touch screens. It displays lighter photos and loads quicker.

Conclusion
All these versions have been created to be able to display your photos from any device and browser. Screen sizes and capabilities, browsers features and network speeds are constraints we tried to take in account.

Today, we introduce custom domains for your galleries. It means you can now use your own domain names to access your galleries. You need to change the A Record of your DNS and link it in the library.

Read how to link a custom domain to your PicsEngine gallery.

For example, I mapped the demo gallery with this domain : http://photos.michaelvillar.com/

Due to the number of people importing their PicsEngine 3 into the new PicsEngine 4, the importation of the photos may not start instantly. Don’t worry, just start the importation and then you can quit your browser and come back a few hours later to check your photos and albums.

If you have any question, please let a comment.

Français :
Du au nombre d’utilisateurs important leur PicsEngine 3 dans le nouveau PicsEngine 4, l’importation des photos peut ne pas démarer directement. Ne vous inquietez pas, lancez simplement l’importation et quitter le navigateur si les photos n’arrivent pas. Vous pouvez revenir quelques heures plus tard lorsque l’importation aura été faite sur nos serveurs.

Si vous avez des questions, laissez un commentaire.