28 April, 2008

So, how do photos look here?

This is my little trial of the quality of photos in Blogspot. This one here was uploaded with no changes from the camera, it was 1.1MB originally.



LiveJournal always seemed to struggle with displaying portrait format photos. Here's one, also at original size and compression.




So far, Blogspot isn't doing too well. The exif data for this image says it should be rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise. Seems like Blogspot isn't interested in that and that changing the image after uploading it is difficult or impossible.

Here's the same photo after it's been exported at full size and with mimimum (no?) compression from iPhoto. It's the right way around now but I don't really want to have to load each photo into iPhoto then export it again before I can post it correctly.
Oh, and it seems that Blogspot puts each new image at the start of a post rather than at the cursor position. That's just plain annoying.



Since I often want to make a bunch of photos available, but only have some of them appear in my blog, I like to be able to link a post to a gallery/album of photos. Best would be if I could upload an album and then select a couple of photos from it to post in my blog. It seems that Blogspot and Picasa web albums should allow this sort of integration...

This album was exported from iPhoto to Picasa web albums using iPhoto. The exporting was pretty simple and snappy --- even if I did have to use hungry ol' iPhoto for it. I guess if Picasa for Mac is ever released that could improve that step a bit. Now, let's see if I can link to or import those photos into this post.


Woah! that's big. Well, I didn't set the size of the image so that's to be expected. It is also a bit of a pain since I have to do all the html for the image myself in order to get a link back to the original image --- not the end of the world, but more effort than I hoped would be needed. I'll try that image again but with reducing the size of the image...


I suppose I should be able to import a picture from Picasa web albums using the import url widget that blogspot has...



Well, that seems to work. Sort of... I guess I expected things to work a bit more easily and for there to be more integration between the various Google products. Still, things look nice here at least. Nice enough that I'll try switching to Blogspot for a bit to see how it goes.