Show off your panoramas
March 4, 2010
When you're out with your camera, think "panorama" since it's so easy to create a panoramic view by snapping a number of shots. The only requirement to create a panoramic photo is to overlap each shot by about fifty percent and the software, Live Photo Gallery, will do the rest.
Once you've loaded your photos onto your computer - using Live Photo Gallery - tag your photos and include a Panorama tag on your photos so you can easily find your panoramas at a later date.
To create your panorama, in Live Photo Gallery select the photos you need and click on the Make menu and then click Create panoramic photo - it's the first item on the dropdown menu. Live Photo Gallery will get to work. If successful, you'll be prompted to name your panorama file and save it. Done.
Now you can view the panorama in Live Photo Gallery. Remember that you're able to zoom in and out using the mouse scroll wheel and pan around by dragging the mouse.
All well and good thus far. So when you have visitors, you can sit them down at your computer and let them marvel at your panoramic works of art. But what about all your family and friends who won't be visiting? This is when we make use of the Internet particularly our free 25,000 megabytes of free online storage at Live Skydrive and a site called Seadragon.com.
Before moving on, take a minute to click on Info in Live Photo Gallery. Down in the bottom right corner is a collection of information about your panorama. Look at the dimension numbers - webDotWiz just picked one of his panoramas and the width and height is 13,000 pixels by 3,000 pixels. Given that a 19 inch LED screen is 1440 pixels wide and 900 pixels high, webDotWiz would need ten screens to show off his panorama in full view. That's why we need to zoom in and out and pan around in Live Photo Gallery. What we want to do is be able to do the same on the Internet using our browser.
Step one is to upload our panorama to a photos album on our Live Skydrive. For large photos, we use the upload tool in our Live Photos page rather than the upload tool in Live Photo Gallery.
To get to Live photos (photos.live.com), we can click on the What's new link in Live Messenger to take us to our Live Home page (home.live.com) and click on Photos on the top menu, or, if we're already in our Live Hotmail, click on Photos on the top menu, or go directly to photos.live.com in our browser.
Once your Live Photos page loads, create a new album called Panoramas (if you haven't already done so) in which to store all your panoramic works of art.
Click Add Photos to upload your panorama. You have a couple of otpions at this stage: you can either drag 'n' drop your photo from Live Photo Gallery into the area marked Drop photos here or below this area you can choose to Select photos from your computer. Make your choice so that you have a photo waiting to be uploaded.
Before clicking the Upload button at the bottom of the page, check the top right of the upload photo box to make sure your photo will be stored in its Original size. Click Upload and it's time for a cuppa. Note, it's best when uploading large photos such as panoramas to do one photo at a time mainly because of the slow upload speeds provided by our Internet Service Providers.
Once you have uploaded your panorama, click the photo thumbnal in the album view which loads the photo by itself. We want to get the Web address information that's over on the right-hand side of the page - you may have to scroll down a bit to find it. Click in the box to highlight the web address and copy it (CTRL-C).
Now open a new tab in your browser and go to www.seadragon.com. In the box showing http://, delete it, paste in the web address of your photo and click Create. Wait a few minutes until your photo is processed and then you can zoom in and out and pan around.
Finally, make a note of the web address of your photo - it'll be something like www.seadragon.com/view/kqj (it would be best to copy and paste this address into a new entry in your Live Spaces). Now you can tell family and friends where to view your panoramas online.
As you create each new panorama in Live Photo Gallery, upload it online to your Panoramas album in your Live Photos, copy its Web address into Seadragon and add the link to an entry in your Live Spaces.