HOW-TO: Photo Gallery using Cincopa, WordPress, iPhone, AutoStitch…

In order to expand the media resources I can share through a variety of websites, I’m experimenting with a few new tools, and thought I’d share the journey with you! I should point out that I’m on a mission to become as mobile as possible, and am trying to use my computer for fewer and fewer steps along the way. (Not quite there yet, but working on it…)

1. First, I have an (now “old”) iPhone 3G. I also have a photo-editing app called AutoStitch (cool aside: it’s developed by a team of pretty smart folks right here in Vancouver, BC!). Oh, and I have Adobe’s PhotoShop Express app, too. Nearly forgot that one!
2. I have a WordPress site (or six). You’re looking at one of them right now.
3. I just signed up for a free version of Cincopa, a web-based multimedia gallery service, and added the plug-in to my site.
4. I experimented with taking a series of pictures of a wide scene, learning that I needed to overlap them with something really distinctive as much as I could (e.g. a tree in the foreground, or a mountain in the background, something). I also learned that I need to be very careful to turn just the iPhone camera lens, not my whole body, or the perspective actually changes too much and I get “ghosts” in my stitched-together pictures. (Some pictures I took with my “big” camera and then loaded them onto my iPhone. Others I took with my iPhone only. Can you tell the difference?)
5. I tried just stitching the series of photos together at first, but I discovered that if my horizons were slightly tilted one way and another I got a very weird, wonky panorama that makes the viewer feel a little like they must be sea-sick or something, and I really wouldn’t like to turn you green… oh dear…
6. So my sixth (or really, fifth, I suppose) step became opening each picture in PhotoShop Express on my iPhone and checking the straightness of each photo. In a few cases, I also decided to crop them a little to knock out unwanted artefacts, like a bug on the windscreen or reflecting lights on the window, or whatever.
7. Next, I opened AutoStitch and selected the photos I wanted to paste together. Once I saw the results (it takes a few moments, my iPhone 3G really has to think hard for it’s limited little brain!), I either saved it or fixed the photos some more, then I used the crop function in AutoStitch to trim the fuzzy edges away in most, though not all, pictures.
8. I uploaded the finished results to my shiny new Cincopa freebie account, it created a gallery for me and even gave me a code to insert in my WordPress post to make it all show up in my website
9. I pasted the code right into the body of this post, below, to see what happens.
10. Crossing my fingers, and hitting “Publish!” No, not really. (heh heh!) Hitting “Preview.”  (OK, I’m a chicken.)

What I got at first looked like this:

Screenshot of photo, showing that caption is too long

Without any hints from Cincopa that my caption/stories were too long, it turns out that, well, they were! So I went back and edited them down (always a good thing to do anyway), and Cincopa automatically “fixed” them in my blog post.

This time I hit “Publish,” and I’m ecstatic with the result!

All I have to do now is figure out how to go fully-mobile, but I’ll have to rummage around the Cincopa site a little to see what I can find there to help me. That’s really the only step I can see that I need to solve; the rest I can do with just my iPhone (pictures) and iPad (better for blogging).

What do you think about all this? Got any tips for me?

[cincopa 10737741]