Atpic news

2008-05-26:

New 'direct' server names scheme and 'direct' URLs: As you may know Atpic uses a cluster of web servers to store and serve the pictures. This is good as it allows the web site to scale well with the number of members. But we had two problems with the server names:

• Changing names of FTP servers. As a user may be moved from one server to another server the FTP server name was subject to change. Now, the FTP server name will remain the same for the acount life and is: uUID.direct.atpic.com. If for instance the account User ID (UID) is 999, then your direct server will be: u999.direct.atpic.com.
• Performance issues in 'hot linking'. This new server naming is also used for 'hot linking'. You do 'hot linking' when, for instance, you post a direct link to an Atpic picture from a forum. The old direct URLs were built as follows:
  http://direct.atpic.com/UID/GID/Secret/PID/Resolution.Extension
  When a lot of users were posting images in forums using those URLs, the overhead generated by looking up on what server the picture actually was, was causing big performance issues. The new URL format is:
  http://uUID.direct.atpic.com/GID/Secret/PID/Resolution.Extension

We hope this new convention will allow our infrastucture to serve fast the ever increasing amount of pictures hosted on Atpic. We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this change, but the decision had to be made for the future of Atpic. More information is available in the FAQ.

2008-02-19:

The immersive gallery slideshow from Piclens is now available on Atpic. Go to any gallery page with firefox and the Piclens plugin, click on the Piclens slideshow link and navigate within the gallery in 3 dimensions! Enjoy!

2008-01-06:

A simple PM (Private Message) system has been released. On the contrary to Atpic Comments, a Private Message will not be shown on the web site. Non Atpic members are able to send a member a PM but will have to leave a valid email address to be contacted back. Atpic members can contact other Atpic members using a PM and their email will not be shown to the recipient of the message. Atpic administrators will also use the messaging system to contact the members. Indeed we have been answering support questions asked by Atpic users and the answer mail has never been received. This is the case of many users having an email address at hotmail.com. It seems the hotmail.com anti-spam software blocks many valid mails. The system look and feel will be improved over time. As for comments, an email notification will be sent to the message recipient each time a new PM is created. You can read your Private Messages once logged into your account by clicking on the 'pm' link.

2008-01-01:

A new slide show written in Flash is now available. This is an easy way to include your pictures in other web sites. It is also a nice and interactive way of presenting your photos. More details can be found in the wiki.

2007-10-20:

Unfortunately, due to performance issues, we had to change the way Atpic documents are hotlinked. The simpler but less efficient scheme based on the 'raw' URLs has now been replaced by a more involved but much more efficient scheme. The new scheme based on a new hostname 'direct.atpic.com' is described in the FAQ and direct URLs are displayed on each document presentation page for easy cut and paste.

2007-09-10:

Yet another cool Atpic feature: How many times a day do you visit Google home page? Wouldn't it be cool to view one of your pictures each time you visit google.com? Well, at Atpic, we thought it would and we created google.atpic.com. Each time you visit this page you will see in background a picture hosted on Atpic.com. You can choose between a random Atpic picture, a random picture made by an Atpic member (you for instance), a random picture within a gallery, or a predefined picture. The result of your google search will also have the picture as background. More information is available in the FAQ. Come to Atpic's blog to discuss this new coolest feature!

2007-09-08:

Atpic has now its blog: blog.atpic.com. It is hosted on blogspot.com (Blogger). News will be cross-posted on the blog: This will allow Atpic community to leave comments about the new features.

2007-08-15:

Two new resolutions of image files are now available: 350 pixels and 70 pixels. Do you like the new Atpic home page look? We have used those two new formats.

2007-08-15:

The FTP credentials have been simplified: The username and password used to log into your FTP server are now the same as the username and password used to log into your web account mangement page. Please keep in mind we have several FTP servers and that if you try to connect to a FTP server your acount is not associated with, the login will fail.

2007-05-19:

To better serve Atpic users, a new server has been added to Atpic cluster. Users on the server user1.atpic.com have been moved it this new server called user2.atpic.com. This should be transparent to users except for FTP transfers. To upload documents by FTP, those users should now use user2.atpic.com as FTP server. This information is reminded in each account in the FTP tab. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have questions about this move.

2007-05-10:

The interface to move mutiple pictures uploaded by FTP into a gallery has bee made more robust. The job of generating the thumbnails for each picture is now a process running in background. This is to avoid timeout issues when resizing a large number of pictures. You can now select hundreds of pictures in your FTP zone, press the submit button and go peacefully to have your cup of tea or even take more pictures!

2007-04-19:

The tree navigation has been improved. Now, thumbnails for subgalleries are shown in the parent galleries. When a gallery has several children and is itself child of another gallery, the thumbnail in that top gallery corresponds to the picture with the highest priority.

2007-04-02:

You can now create subdirectories in your FTP zone and load the documents from those subdirectories into your galleries.

2007-02-09:

You can now choose between the Google and Yahoo! API to view the world maps of Atpic pictures. The two maps can be accessed at:
http://maps.atpic.com/map.php?api=yahoo
http://maps.atpic.com/map.php?api=google

2007-01-11:

A new tool to get the latitude and longitude of a point on the Earth is available at: http://atpic.com/map_helper_yahoo.html
It is based on the Yahoo! Maps API and covers more countries than the Google Maps version available at: http://atpic.com/map_helper.html

2006-12-27:

Geotagging of pictures is available on Atpic! Click here for more information. Or go directly to the maps: http://maps.atpic.com!

2006-12-27:

Two Google groups have been opened to allow you to discuss about Atpic.com. Groups are detailed in the FAQ.

2006-12-03:

Surfers viewing your documents can now choose wether they want to see the document's tags or not. This choice is saved into a cookie; The default behaviour is to hide the tags.

2006-11-12:

The page http://top.atpic.com uses a new popularity algorithm. To learn how to improve the popularity of your pictures, read the popularity FAQ.

2006-11-11:

The search engine is now powered by the tag index. This increases the speed of the search a lot.

2006-11-11:

The files uploaded by FTP are now sorted alphabetically. They were before ordered by time of upload causing random ordering in the gallery.

2006-11-10:

We are beginning to get famous! ;) Captology.tv dedicates an article to three major picture sharing sites, including Atpic.com: http://captology.tv/node/169

2006-10-28:

A visit counter has been released. Every artist, gallery and picture has now a hit counter. The counters are incremented by one each time the corresponding page is loaded with a javascript aware browser.

2006-10-27:

Tags can now be sorted alphabetically. Tags sorted alphabetically are found at: alphatag.atpic.com; Tags sorted by frequency are found at: tag.atpic.com

2006-10-27:

You can now track how many hits your documents get. We count hits to your homepage, your galleries and each picture. The counter value is presented by default at the bottom of the page.

2006-10-09:

Broad folksonomy now available! Bookmark Atpic documents, the clever way, now! We hope you become as exited by this new classification feature as we are here at Atpic. And be careful, this is not a narrow folksonomy, where only the document owner can tag his documents like other sites propose. You can read more about this innovating feature in our folksonomy FAQ.

2006-10-09:

A new antispam solution has been released. For more details please see our CAPTCHA FAQ.

2006-06-06:

The parallelized code has been released. Indeed, due to Atpic success, one computer, even large was not enough to serve and store all the data. All new accounts are now opened on the new server. To store using HTTP you still need to log in into your account at the usual page: http://atpic.com. For FTP uploads, you need to use the connection settings given in your atpic account management page. If you find a problem with the new features or need more information, do not hesitate to contact us.

2006-05-18:

A tool that generates a thumbnail for each style has been installed. This should make the choice of the style much easier. The up to date lists of styles are available here: CSS, template, skin

2006-05-12:

Big news for Atpic: After a long development period, the styling features are out. You can now define your own CSS and cascade sevral sheets on one page. Using Atpic templates, you can present and structure the HTML code exactly as you want. The combination of flexible CSS and template transforms Atpic in one of the most configurable picture and video hosting sites of the market. More information about styling, CSS and templates can be found below:

• Styling
• CSS
• Templates

If you find a problem with the new features or need more information, do not hesitate to contact us.

2006-05-12:

Atpic now serves the pages in XHTML 1.1 format with a XML header to browsers supporting this format (like Mozilla, Firefox and konqueror). Atpic continue to serve pages in HTML 4.01 Transitional format to other browsers (like IE 6).

2006-01-22:

Atpic has now its favicon!;)

2006-01-22:

The way the automatic resize engine works has been changed: Now, images need to be 20% larger than the target resolution to trigger the automatic scaling. For instance, before, when you uploaded a 610x406 pixel image, a second image with size 600x400 was created. Now, you will need to upload a image whose longest side is longer than 720 pixels to trigger the scaling down to 600 pixels. This will avoid storing two images with almost the same resolution.

2006-01-07:

All pages contains now an automatic javascript preload script. This should make viewing successive pages more pleasant.

2006-01-07:

The top voted pictures are available at the following address: http://top.atpic.com

2006-01-02:

The comment written in the EXIF UserComments field is now inserted in Atpic picture description field.

2005-12-28:

Websurfers can now rate the images on atpic.

2005-12-25:

Un new frame extraction tool has been installed. More codecs are now supported. You can now upload your videos in WMV (ASF) format.

2005-12-11:

Statistics about cameras used to take picture hosted on Atpic are now available at this address: http://atpic.com/camera.php

2005-12-03:

The image display speed in a slide show can now be changed.

2005-12-03:

In the gallery properties, an option is now available to decide if individual pictures need to be automatically framed, as in the gallery pages, or not.

2005-11-30:

Galleries can now be viewed in a slide show. For a better viewing experience, images are prefetched during the show. More information can be found in the FAQ.

2005-11-20:

The user home page can now be presented using various CSS style sheets. User can choose between two page layouts and numerous style sheets. If you have created a new style you would to use, just contact us and will will make them available to all Atpic users.

2005-11-20:

The number of direct links to other pictures from a picture presentation page has been limited to 10. This should improve the presentation of pictures beloging to galleries that contain a lot of pictures.

2005-11-16:

Users can update and delete the comments made about their work. Registered users who have posted a comment about another member's work can now update or delete it.

2005-11-12:

The forum and comment pages have been reformatted: comments for photographers now includes also comments about the galleries and pictures of the photographer. Comments for a gallerie now includes also comments about the pictures in the gallerie. Each photographer, gallery or picture identify a unique thread that can be tracked by RSS.

2005-11-12:

RSS feeds have been added to track the forums. Please look at the FAQ for more information.

2005-11-07:

Atpic provides RSS 2 feeds to read in your RSS news reader or into your blog/web site. More information about the feeds in the FAQ: RSS FAQ

2005-07-09:

The help and Atpic presentation pages are now regrouped into two documents : a FAQ (Frequetly Asked Questions) and a feature page. As time goes, this help system will be updated and improved. The links are: Atpic FAQ, Atpic Features Page.

2005-06-28:

A simple search engine is now available. The form is at the top of the "Atpic News" paragraph.

2005-06-23:

On the http://user.atpic.com web site, you can now sort users by name and by id.

2005-06-23:

You can now setup your account to make it available by name and not only by ID. That is now you can refer to your home page using http://mydomain.atpic.com instead of using http://atpic.com/MyID. Existing users should go to the "update data" link and choose their domain.

2005-06-06:

You uploaded a picture but forgot to rotate it before on your computer? That's not too late : Now Atpic allows you to rotate pictures from your picture management interface. More information on how to use this new feature here.

2005-06-06:

To make the order of pictures in a gallery consistent with rotation, the default priority has been changed. Default priority was empty, now default priority is a 12 characters string containing the PicId prependended by "a"'s.

2005-05-25:

Deletion of an entire gallery is now possible.

2005-05-25:

You can now protect your galleries. Protected galleries can be seen only by users knowing its secret key.

2005-05-08:

The number of rows and columns of thumbnails for gallery pages can now be modified using the rows and columns parameters.

2005-04-18:

Due to a registrar move, some DNS issues are expected this week. In the case your computer can not resolve the atpic.com domain, just enter our IP address 69.93.100.234 in your local "hosts" file. We apologize for the inconvenience.

2005-04-15:

NOW you can upload VIDEOS! Atpic video hosting solution is available for testing. More information on how to upload your videos here.

2005-04-06:

The URL naming convention for direct access to an image has been changed To access directly to the JPEG file with ID picID, just go to http://raw.atpic.com/picID. More details in the subscription page.

2005-03-25:

The new ftp service is open! It allows you to upload easyly several files at one time. Click here for more information on how to upload files by ftp.

2005-02-07:

A link to open a session by email has been added for those who forget their password.

2005-02-06:

The emails sent by Atpic are now Unicode encoded. This allows accents and non latin alphabet based languages (like Russian, Greek, Chinese, etc...).

2004-11-27:

The links to the other pictures of a picture page are now located bellow the picture. All comments are now moved to a special site: forum.atpic.com

2004-07-27:

Internationalization work is going well: See the French, Spanish, German and Dutch versions: http://atpic.com/fr, http://atpic.com/es, http://atpic.com/de, http://atpic.com/nl.

2004-07-25:

ATPIC NEEDS YOU! The internationalization tool is now available! Learn how you can participate to the development of Atpic.

2004-07-16:

Now gallery.atpic.com and pic.atpic.com show the latest galleries and pictures first.

2004-06-22:

As long as this site remains free, the web space is unlimited for all accounts!

2004-06-10:

You can now sort your galleries and pictures using the priority field.