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 !

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.

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/

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.

This is a simple post to demonstrate how you can integration PicsEngine in a blog post. It’s really easy to do with the javascript code provided in your gallery panel.

Here is the code which has been used :
<div style="height:400px;margin:20px 30px;border:1px solid #000;background:#000;"><script src="http://demo.picsengine.com/embed?width=100%25&amp;height=100%25" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script></div>

The new website is online if you want to explore the different features or know more about the product itself. The pricing plan is also fixed.

Each beta user enters now the 30-day free trial like every new user that subscribes.

Please tweet about this announcement : Tweet it.

Thanks again to every beta user!

This allows photo galleries to have better URLs like yourname.picsengine.com. You can have multiple galleries URLs like my_wedding_2010.picsengine.com or wedding.yourname.picsengine.com if you prefer.

I also have fixed a lot of bugs these days and improved many things. I know there are still some bugs, I’m working on it! If you have problems, please send me your feedback.

If I paid for PicsEngine 3, do I need to pay for PicsEngine 4?

Yes, PicsEngine 4 is not the same as PicsEngine 3. It will be hosted and there will be not script to install on your own server. Costs will be per month/year. Also, PicsEngine 4 is a totally new version and has been rewritten from scratch. Every PicsEngine 3 users will need to pay for the 4th version if they want to update.

Will I lose all my PicsEngine 3 photos if I switch to PicsEngine 4?

No, I will be working on a script to import your photos and albums into PicsEngine 4. It will be more convenient for you.

Can we already subscribe to PicsEngine 4?

No, PicsEngine 4 is still in development. You can subscribe to the beta and use it for free for now.

If you have any more questions on this subject, post a comment.

• 1. A single person isn’t enough to have servers running 24/24.
• 2. If my servers crash, it takes time to recover them. I can’t afford multiple backup servers.
• 3. If there is a huge traffic for a limited time, my servers wouldn’t be enough. I can’t buy servers for just some special occasions.
• 4. Your photos are the most important thing of the platform. If a hard-disk fails (or even two if we assume I use Raid-1), your photos may be lost, you’ll not be happy and PicsEngine is crap.

Each one of these problems has a solution. Let’s explain the two services which are going to fix these problems.

Heroku

As they say, Heroku is a platform as a service to host your Rails applications (and Rack applications in general). It means that a whole team is working to keep servers running. That fixes the first problem. Heroku also means that a lot of servers are at your disposition. If a server crashes, another one can be used without a pain thanks to their dyno grid. The second problem doesn’t exists anymore! Finally, the best thing about Heroku is the number of dynos that are running (see a dyno as a process that can respond to your requests) can be changed in real-time. If an user have a lot of traffic, the number of dynos can be increased and the other users will never see any problem.

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 is an online storage web service which assure a 99.999999999% durability for hosted files. You cannot have this durability anywhere else. Files hosted on Amazon S3 are replicated in multiple locations. Forget about your home backup, Amazon have the better backup service ever. This was the solution to the 4th problem. Another deal with Amazon S3 is that the storage space we can use is virtually unlimited, think about that.

By using these services, PicsEngine will be more robust and reliable. Also, I’m not worried about server or backup issues which means I’ll be more focused on the application development itself.

Beta users
Unfortunatelly, I couldn’t easily restore your photo libraries from my server to the new architecture. Your new library will be empty, sorry. I don’t know if you have but for now, you shouldn’t use PicsEngine for important stuffs until it’s finished. Thanks for your feedbacks, I really appreciated them.

Who wanted to upload pictures by drag and drop? Well, I guess everybody wanted that because it’s the simplest way to upload files. Now you can just drag your files from the Finder (or what-ever) and drop them where the others photos are on PicsEngine. Thanks HTML5 :)

Those features wouldn’t have been possible without DeepDropUpload which I improved to have Firefox compatibility (thanks to this post).

Note : PicsEngine 4 hasn’t a Flash component anymore! SWFUpload was the last one.