The first photo I checked was a 360 pano, so that got me thinking about 360 VRs. I had a look on 360cities.net, to see if it would be worth uploading my panos there. The benefits of having your panos on 360 cities are:
- You/your panos get exposure on the 360 cities website (I don't know how much traffic it gets, but I would guess quite a bit).
- Your panos appear in Google Earth (but under the 360 cities brand rather than your own, and only for users who have ticked the 360 cities box in the options of what to show)
- You can host your panos with 360 cities and embed the panos in your own web page, thus saving you the hassle of converting your panos into cube faces and multiple sizes. Also, you don't need to pay for a flash panorama player license, and the bandwidth for the images and player is covered by 360 cities.
360 cities also sell prints of images and license them, and pay you a commission. If someone buys a print/licenses and image through them, when they otherwise would have gone direct through you, this would mean that you loose out on the money that is paid to 360 cities in commission. However, if the person buying the print/license wouldn't have bought the print/license otherwise, then you're essentially getting money for nothing.
The drawbacks of using 360 cities for hosting panos appear to be
- Your embedded panos will have 360 cities branding
- By making your panos available on 360 cities, there is the possibility that your pano on 360 cities may rank higher than the pano on your own website. So you could effectively be robbing your own website of traffic.
After reading the various FAQs and checking the 360 cities forum, I saw a post showing advertising inside a pano. I posted a question on the thread asking them if it is possible that they may add advertising inside embedded panos in the future. If they may do this, then I won't rely on them for my panos, otherwise I think I may join 360 cities and use it for hosting my panos.
While looking at the FAQs on the 360 cities website, I found that they use a service called Fotomoto for handling print sales. Print sales is something I want to add to my photo website, so I decided to check them out. Looking at Fotomoto's FAQ, I saw they are based in the US, but ship worldwide and accept a range of currencies.
Checking the dpreview forums, the only posts I could find were people asking whether they were any good. Doing a google search, most articles seemed to just be press releases from Fotomoto, though I did find this post about the print quality being decent. Anyway, I didn't find any negative comments about Fotomoto. From their FAQ it seems a good solution for integrating with my website, from the looks of it, you don't have to upload your photos to their website to offer the prints, you just include some code in your webpage, and the Fotomoto 'toolbar' automatically recognises the image and adds buttons to make it available for purchase.
I think the system is javascript based, which isn't that great (javascript is good, but should always be used an enhancement rather for basic functionality, since not all people have javascript available). Still, the majority of people have javascript available, and it would be better than nothing. The other thing that's a bit unclear is how it recognises the image that the print is available of, and how it knows how to get the high-res version for printing. I think I will have to try it out and see how it works.
As well as uploading a few of the Korea photos to my photo website, I also uploaded one of the Carpet beetle photos to various photo sharing websites.
In the afternoon I carried on checking the metadata of the images, and also checked TWS. One of the images also needed a bit of modification.
In the evening I watched an episode of The Office (US) with Mauser, then finished checking the metadata of the images. I checked Andy Rouse's blog, The Luminous Landscape, and Moose Peterson's News Blog, while doing a backup.
The weather started off sunny, then it came over foggy and cloudy. The fog cleared and it was sunny for a bit, and then it clouded over again. And this was all before 10.30am! The rest of the day was overcast. Near sunset most of the cloud blew away, and the sun set behind a veil of cloud. The cloud got sort of pinky coloured, but it wasn't that good a sunset really.
Food
Breakfast: Orange Marmalade Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: 2x Ibuprofen; 2x Cheese on Toasts; Banana; Slice of Angel Layer Cake; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Burger with grated Mature Cheddar Cheese and Tomato Ketchup in a Bun; Vegetable flavour Rice. Pudding was Flan with Cream - yummy! Coffee.
Supper: Shortcake Biscuit; Choc Chip Cookie; Cup o' Tea.
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