#100DoPP d68 Tuesday, I switched mobile photo posting from @Instagram to @SwarmApp: 1. higher-res JPGs 2. POSSEing higher res also 3. Publish more photos to my site (than is typical on Instagram, which has a culture of encouraging maybe 1-2 photos a day at most) I have been using Instagram as a mobile photo posting client because of its convenient iOS native application UI, and then manually creating photo posts on my site after the fact, which are then automatically syndicated (POSSEd) to Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter. This past Sunday the Instagram app kept crashing (iPod 6 touch 128GB, latest iOS10.2.x) when I tried to post a handful of photos as a multi-photo post. This repeated Instagram app crashing (like five times in a row when I went to "Share") was sufficiently frustrating that I started considering other options. When I looked into the photos I privately posted to Swarm, I noticed that they were of much higher resolution! (like landscape 1920px width instead of Instagram’s 1080, or 750 for multi-photos!). I tested embedding the Swarm images on two recent photos I had used Instagram to originally post on Sunday of ferns unfurling and dew-drop laden plants in Golden Gate Park: * http://tantek.com/2017/085/t1/spirals-ferns * http://tantek.com/2017/085/t2/droplets-leaf-tips-plants Worked great and the extra resolution was simply gorgeous. Two challenges however: I did not want to make every viewer of photos on my website have to download the larger higher-resolution photo, and I did not want to link to my Swarm posts, as it seemed wrong to link from a photo post to a checkin post as a syndicated copy. So I solved both challenges with one solution, which was to first embed/show a 960px width image (default for Swarm/Foursquare permalink web view) on my photo posts, and then hyperlink it to the higher resolution 1920px version so it would both be easily discoverable, and so I could mark it up with the 'u-photo' microformats class so that’s the version Brid.gy would use to syndicate copies for me. Here’s an example photo I posted that Tuesday night, also from that Sunday run in Golden Gate Park, to try it out: * http://tantek.com/2017/087/t2/orange-curls-flower Worked great, and I really liked the fact that if you click on the photo you now get a higher resolution version, instead of being directed to a silo post (Instagram). I’ll still post some of these photos to Instagram, but now when I do so I can post them with a copy of the caption from the Twitter copy, which includes a permashortlink back to the original on my own website! And then I’ll just add a "View on Instagram" syndicated copy link along with the other POSSE destinations displayed in the lower-right of my posts (see the orange-curls-flower link above for an example). (Aside: Instagram doesn’t auto-link URLs though, which provides additional motivation to keep URLs shorter, cleaner, and easy to type.) I have more thoughts about my photo posting workflow as it were (e.g. checking-in whenever I take a photo, but not uploading the photo til later), but I’m going to stick with this change and iterate as needed for a week before writing that up more definitively.

#100DoPP d68 Tuesday,
I switched mobile photo posting from @Instagram to @SwarmApp:
1. higher-res JPGs
2. POSSEing higher res also
3. Publish more photos to my site (than is typical on Instagram, which has a culture of encouraging maybe 1-2 photos a day at most)

I have been using Instagram as a mobile photo posting client because of its convenient iOS native application UI, and then manually creating photo posts on my site after the fact, which are then automatically syndicated (POSSEd) to Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter.

This past Sunday the Instagram app kept crashing (iPod 6 touch 128GB, latest iOS10.2.x) when I tried to post a handful of photos as a multi-photo post.

This repeated Instagram app crashing (like five times in a row when I went to "Share") was sufficiently frustrating that I started considering other options. When I looked into the photos I privately posted to Swarm, I noticed that they were of much higher resolution! (like landscape 1920px width instead of Instagram’s 1080, or 750 for multi-photos!).

I tested embedding the Swarm images on two recent photos I had used Instagram to originally post on Sunday of ferns unfurling and dew-drop laden plants in Golden Gate Park:

* http://tantek.com/2017/085/t1/spirals-ferns
* http://tantek.com/2017/085/t2/droplets-leaf-tips-plants

Worked great and the extra resolution was simply gorgeous.

Two challenges however: I did not want to make every viewer of photos on my website have to download the larger higher-resolution photo, and I did not want to link to my Swarm posts, as it seemed wrong to link from a photo post to a checkin post as a syndicated copy.

So I solved both challenges with one solution, which was to first embed/show a 960px width image (default for Swarm/Foursquare permalink web view) on my photo posts, and then hyperlink it to the higher resolution 1920px version so it would both be easily discoverable, and so I could mark it up with the 'u-photo' microformats class so that’s the version Brid.gy would use to syndicate copies for me.

Here’s an example photo I posted that Tuesday night, also from that Sunday run in Golden Gate Park, to try it out:

* http://tantek.com/2017/087/t2/orange-curls-flower

Worked great, and I really liked the fact that if you click on the photo you now get a higher resolution version, instead of being directed to a silo post (Instagram).

I’ll still post some of these photos to Instagram, but now when I do so I can post them with a copy of the caption from the Twitter copy, which includes a permashortlink back to the original on my own website! And then I’ll just add a "View on Instagram" syndicated copy link along with the other POSSE destinations displayed in the lower-right of my posts (see the orange-curls-flower link above for an example).

(Aside: Instagram doesn’t auto-link URLs though, which provides additional motivation to keep URLs shorter, cleaner, and easy to type.)

I have more thoughts about my photo posting workflow as it were (e.g. checking-in whenever I take a photo, but not uploading the photo til later), but I’m going to stick with this change and iterate as needed for a week before writing that up more definitively.