Why some map windows do appear empty?

You have probably seen that, after uploading a painting, in some cases the map window at the right of the painting appears empty. There is no the map image that you probably selected at the time of uploading but a repeated message saying "Sorry, there are no images of this region at this zoom level". Why do this happen?

When you upload a painting, Paintmap displays the map at a predetermined zoom scale and, in some regions, Google has not images at that scale. The consequence is a map window without a map and a feeling of frustration for the autor of the painting. Faroe Islands is one of these problematic regions but there are others. For the visitor or the author himself to see the map of the uploaded painting, the only solution in this case is to reduce the scale (using the bar or scrolling) until an acceptable image of the region is displayed.

In Paintmap we are not happy with this inconvenient and the solution we envisage is to find the maximum zoom scale compatible with all the world regions. That would be then the geolocation scale shown for all the paintings, although the visitor will always have the command of the tools (zoom bar, scrolling, hand lateral displacement) to explore the painted region, since this is one of the core objectives of Paintmap.

We'll eliminate this inconvenient as soon as possible. In the meantime, we thank you for your patience.

Redesigning Painmap, next changes

As you can see, this week we have started to redesign paintmap.

It's going to be a long process and we expect to get a better user experience. Our plan includes some major changes: add a new and easier way to upload paintings, improvement of the user profile with a new artist map and Bio and a new search box to search for artists and users.

We continue working to make Paintmap.com a better place.

Digital Art and the unique goals of Paintmap

Recently Paintmap is having the frequent loading of photographs simply processed with some of the Photoshop “artistic” filters. Even more, some of the original photographs come from Panoramio, as you know the correct web site for geo-referenced photographs.
This is an illustrative example:


http://www.panoramio.com/photo/15162691
http://www.paintmap.com/?item=1408



In my opinion, this is placing Paintmap’s “Digital Art” cathegory in a difficult position and makes necessary to take some decissions about what is acceptable and what is not in Paintmap, independently of the scope and potentials of the so called Digital Art as well as its consideration in the artistic forums existing in the web (for example, WetCanvas or NellArteforum).

A possibility would be to restrict Paintmap’s concept of Digital Art to that using traditional techniques such as virtual brushes on virtual canvas without the aid of filters, effects, cloneing, painting over or plugins (this is the content of the “Painters Alley”, Digital Art subforum in WetCanvas).

A wider concept would include the potentials of image processing and a quick tour through the WetCanvas Digital Art forum will show you the diversity of software options (Corel, Gimp, Twisted brush, Dog Waffle, Art Rage) displayed by digital artists. Photoshop is considered a software mainly used for photo retouching and contributions using this software are very scarce.

In my opinion, to help discriminating CREATIVE digital work from what it is not, Paintmap's administrators should request to digital artists a short description of the digital method employed. In this context I would suggest the rejection by Paintmap of simply Photoshop processed photographs.

Paintmap cool places, do you know any other great place?

If you find a new location plenty of beautiful paintings, now you can suggest new cool places to us.

1. Login with your account and look for a place from the home page map, please check the list of places before suggesting a new one. You can select any zoom level to get a good painting selection.

2. Click "add location to favorites" and set a descriptive name for this area.

3. Finally, go to "Your paintings", and select "suggest cool place" from your list of favorite places.


We are waiting your new cool places!.

Update your bookmarks: paintmap.blogspot.com

We are migrating our blog to Blogger, the google service.

This way we will improve the security and we'll be able to add new services as google friend connect to help you to participate.

Please update your links, RSS and bookmarks to: http://paintmap.blogspot.com.

How-to: Embedded Paintmap Maps

We are working to add more features to the Paintmap Maps for our artists and users, we also strive to make it even easier for non-programmers to embed maps into their webpages.

This is the basic code needed to get a Google Map running on your site (or blog!):

<iframe width="450" height="200" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://www.paintmap.com/frame.php?author=jaime&lat=43&lng=1&zoom=3"></iframe>



Let's see how to change the size map and filter the paintings by author.

You can edit the value of: width="450" and height="250" to play with the map size.

To set the map center edit the string (lat, lng and zoom variables) and remove jaime (change to all) from your code to show all paintmap paintings or add your own user:

author=jaime&lat=34&lng=8&zoom=3

Some examples, show all artists:

<iframe width="450" height="200" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://www.paintmap.com/frame.php?author=all&lat=43&lng=1&zoom=3"></iframe>



All artists with a wide zoom:

<iframe width="450" height="200" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://www.paintmap.com/frame.php?author=all&lat=34&lng=10&zoom=1"></iframe>




If you have a blog, you can add your map in a new page or post thought the HTML editor (visual -> html) and using the same code.

Finally, if you need some coordinates you can use any simple geocoder as: http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/geocoder/singlegeocode.html to get them and apply the zoom you need.

Google Earth, Maps and our new KML!

We Are Proud To Announce our new KML file: http://www.paintmap.com/paintmap.kml.

With this link your are going to be able to explore all paintmap contents through Google earth and Google Maps.

For Google Earth, you have to have installed the google app, its free, download it here: http://earth.google.com/. Then you only have to click here http://www.paintmap.com/paintmap.kml and select, open with Google earth to enjoy.

This new feature works with Google Maps, to see all paintings over the Google Maps interface only visit: Maps!.

In addition you can add paintmap onto your website, please, read our How-To here.

Important for newcomers!

In our blog section you will find a tutorial to start registering, uploading and managing your paintings Coming into Paintmap (I): registering and uploading images, (II) managing your paintings, published on May, 29, 2008. Please read these documents to see the basic steps of these processes.

Another important point to be taken into account is not to forget the double aim of Paintmap, both artistic and environmentalist. Some recommendations to make your posts coherent with this spirit can be read in the blog posts A plea for describing painting subjects, published on June 14, 2008 and Preserving the environmentalist spirit of Paintmap, published on July 28, 2008. Please read them and, if you consider opportune, we would be very pleased to have your opinion and suggestions about this community project.

500 paintings: time to take a breath and clarify some criteria

Paintmap has just reached 500 paintings distributed all around the world including the submarine environment. During this time, the Paintmap team was more concerned about solving technical problems and improving the site easy-of-use although always paying attention to the preservation of Paintmap’s spirit and goals.

In this context, we are sorry to feel obligated to discard some paintings because of the fact that they do not conform to our basic objective: the subject has to contain some message relative to some definite geographical point. The Paintmap team realizes that controlling this requirement is sometimes difficult or ambiguous and the contribution of the artist through his/her comments is then fundamental.

A nice example of this is the painting and the comment by Linda Brachach (http://www.paintmap.com/?item=631):



“These are some of my treasures that I left behind when I sold my cottage in Lanai City. I could not take them, but I wanted to remember them.”

This comment gives to the painting the information required to be considered a coherent contribution to Paintmap.

A purely conceptual painting, whatever its artistic value could be (the Paintmap team does not include art critic members) is outside the goals of Paintmap and we encourage conceptual artists to make use of the appropriate forums for their contributions.

Finally, we would like to note that some of the initial contributions to Paintmap could perhaps be considered of this nature because at that time we were observing the tendencies of people’s interest in Paintmap. After 500 paintings we have a more clear set of criteria to manage and decide about the adequacy of member’s contributions to preserve paintmap’s character but we will always be open to your comments and suggestions about this issue. Thanks!

New paintmap server. We move to Chigago, the greenest City for a Data Center.

This week, paintmap has moved all its services to a new dedicated server located in Chicago.

We have almost doubled the RAM, improved the drive arrays and got a CPU upgrade. Furthermore, we think the new location will be a good place to have a global coverage.

This way we hope to improve our visibility on search engines and give a better service to our American users.

Thank you for your patience.