Scrap Book

I have always liked cutting out pictures and sticking them in books. One of my earliest memories is of being taken into travel agents by my parents to collect travel brochures advertising holidays in exotic parts of the world. The purpose of this exercise was not to research possible holiday destinations, but to obtain a free supply of pictures which I could then cut and paste in albums. In later life I would keep extensive press cutting collections and scrap books full of pictures clipped from newspapers and magazines.

In terms of my clipping activities, the transition from actual to digital has been a long and complex one. But at long last I am now happy with my digital press cutting system (Delicious - which can be accessed via the link in the sidebar) which underwent a new systems update at the beginning of this month which has improved the functionality immeasurably). So I am now free to experiment with my picture-clipping system and for that I am currently using a public Google Notebook album which can be accessed by following this link. Into it goes all those third party images which seem to either say something or are just nice to look at.

Panoramio

Often whilst Google Earth browsing (there should be a better verb available for this activity, growsing or something like that) I have been impressed by the embedded photographs available via the Panoramio layer. If you are not familiar with Google Earth (shame on you), this layer gives you access to fairly high quality images which are "rooted" to the actual locations via the Google Earth maps. Thus, as you wander down a country lane in County Kerry, you can click on one of the little blue spots and see a splendid image of the Iveragh Peninsula - or some such joy. Obviously there was some review and selection procedure at work : the images are quality images and there is not the usual selection of headless mothers and cute dogs one normally associates with on-line photo albums.

So in need of a distraction to keep me from filling-in my tax self-assessment form, I went in search of Panoramio. It is now part of the Google Empire, but the site was established by two young Spanish software engineers who wanted to develop a means by which you could file and display images from a geographical perspective. It has now become hugely popular and the system can be used to both store your images and display them to the public via Google Earth. Once you have an account - in the best Google traditions, free to set up - you can store any photographs and - if you so choose - submit them for inclusion as Google Earth Panoramio images.

So I have my account - you can access it via this LINK - and I have a few images already there. We will have to wait and see whether they pass the Google Earth selection process.