Oh, this sucks

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What is this?

Panoramas tend to be quite large photos, often quite wide ... thousands of pixels wide ... and sometimes quite tall. I was not able to find a photo sharing site that handles panoramas well as the sites resize the photos to a max of something like 800 pixels. This made the panorama far too small to view.

Of course there is a good reason for this (besides the fact that it costs more to host a large photo than a small one and the photo sharing sites have the ambition to make money someday, so they make the photos small and hope you won't notice. I will point out that what one site calls a "super huge" photo is 800x600, which is 1999 state-of-the-art. I will also point out that it is now 2011 and it is really hard to buy a camera that takes a photo that small. Now some sites do allow for larger photos but don't have a good way to display them, which is basically the same problem).

So back to that good reason: monitors. Monitors can display something up to 2000 pixels wide, still too small for any decent sized panorama. And many monitors are smaller than 2000 pixels wide.

So how do you display panorama's on the web?

My solution was to create my own website. I located a plain-old-web-site hosting company that will host anything and put my panoramas there. To make the panoramas viewable with a standard browser, I created a panorama viewing page that allows you easily move thru the photo, showing a browser's worth of the photo at a time. And added some nice features like clever narratives and feature-finders. Think of it as watching slides (remember those?) of a friend's vacation and the friend has a laser pointer to point out trivia and talks on and on about nothing.

You'll enjoy it.

One note: the photos really are quite large and will take some time to load into your browser. I have a standard cable connection and it takes a couple seconds for the "standard" photos. If I select a "large" photo, it will take maybe 10 or more seconds to load.

And the photos really are quite large. At least the Large photos, which might be too large for your browser. Browsers limit the size of a photo and while these photos load fine in Chrome and Firefox using default settings, they may not all load into other browsers. What can I say: either adjust your browser's settings (and it will not be obvious how to make this adjustment) or use a different browser.

Oh, and I use javascript. If you don't have javascript enabled, you won't be able to use the neat features but you still will be able to view the pictures. That is, assuming your browser supports HTML5, which most browsers do except for maybe the one you are using. Even IE mostly supports HTML5.

Now I suppose there are panorama hosting sites and I didn't look hard enough and could have spared myself this work. But it was fun and what else do I have to do with my time?