Hurrah – we’ve finally got the photo ready to upload (or print but as I’m no expert in printing I’ll leave that to the guys who do it to tell you)

I upload my shots to several places, people often ask why? So here’s the reason: so more people can see them. Flickr has a giant community but it’s very different to the huge European community on ipernity, and the instant feedback community of Zooomr. I also use SmugMug – although not from the giant community there – for the absolutely gorgeous customisable experience they provide for the photos. If only I could have the customisability and visual experience of SmugMug, the instant Zipline community of Zooomr, the size of Flickr and the ability to see who’s viewed a photo from ipernity and you’ll have a winner.

Until that time, I’ll use a service called PixelPipe to post items. Whereby you upload once to it, and then it acts as a proxy to post them to the site(s) of your choice (currently over 50). The catch? It does add “via-pixelpipe” as a tag to its uploads – or put t in it’s own gallery so there is a manual step of removing this afterward if you want to. I use the Lightroom Plugin but you can use other software to do it.

The PixelPipe Dialog Box - to export from Lightroom

Right so it’s now up in X places, now what? Well after I trawl through the possible groups for it to go to and add it to them I add a watermark to one of the four corners. I use the same file but have four watermarks to choose from.

I then use a php script I hacked together to pull the latest photo from each site into a page where I can then copy and paste the boxes into a WordPress post for my site. If you are interested in using it, please let me know (although it’s heavily tailored for me obviously!)

I use an PHP file to scrape RSS and build the blog post

The blog post is now live, and when posted it adds it to my Friendfeed by using Sudar’s WordPress to Friendfeed plugin automagically

I post the large photo to Friendfeed with X

Friendfeed then updates Twitter, which updates Facebook and the majority of the useful Social networks are covered!

So how would I like to change this in 2009? I’d like to automatically insert the post details into the db by checking that PHP file regularly through some cron. I’d also like to add more detail from the sites into the blog, for instance who / how many people have viewed or Fave’d the photo, comment counts etc, which will involve using the APIs for each site. (Cue painful token swapping to get to private data) and then building a decent UI for it.

I’d also like to redo the theme here to make it even better, the comment box below the post isn’t exactly pretty. Other than that I want to get the photos to come out of the page and into your hands and on your walls. Watch this space!

We’re coming to an end of these posts, tomorrow sees the last one – backup! see you then!