Brian has been great in helping me doing some late night testing. He usually breaks things. That is a good thing by the way. So Brian has deleted and added all his pindrops multiple times for the sake of functionality and usability.

Everyone say Thank You Brian!

But back to the cluster fudge on Tuesday night. I ended up deleting all my pindrops thinking they were Brian’s pindrops. Doh! So I had to add over 300 pindrops back but it was a quick process. But in doing so I found a bug in the description code that saves the text/html from Flickr. But I am happy to say I am pretty confident that it works just fine after a few hours of late night coding.

I really need to create a pindrop editor that goes out to flickr and updates your title and description. It would make things easier.

Members please take a minute to add your website information. I will be adding the link to your blog or website on each and every photo that you pindrop. This give you more exposure and traffic back to your site.

Accessing the add or delete page will give you access to the profile page.

Notice the new tabs on top? The second tab now shows all the pindrops that are on the viewable map. So this takes care of multiple pindrops on top of each other that would occur with the same location. Here is a screenshot of the second tab and the thumbnails that are on the map.

It is working great and I can’t find any bugs. So I pass the new features on to you. Let me know if you have any problems.

Look for a new Profile feature coming next!

GPS data loggers generally have no screen that shows any information. They generally just have lights to let you know if the device has a GPS fix and if the unit is powered on. All GPS units get their time from satellites. So you can’t set the time on the geo logger. You have to set the time on your camera to the geo logger’s time. You can’t see what the time is on the data logger, no screen, so how do you know what time to sync you camera with?

The answer is simple really. You need to use a time that is as accurate as possible and set your camera to that. Using the time on your car radio, your microwave, or you computer is not the best option. My wife still sets her car radio time 15 minutes fast so she is not late.

GPS time is ahead of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by 14 seconds. GPS time has no time zones and is a fixed world-wide time. But with most cameras they don’t get that accurate to worry about the 14 seconds. I am not sure but I think the 14 second difference has to do with GPS time not recognizing leap time.

The best option you can use to set your camera time accurately will be http://www.time.gov/ or http://time5.nrc.ca/webclock_e.shtml. Both of those websites are JAVA based and show the time as accurately as you can hope for. But what if you are out in the field and your camera needs to have the time again again? I can’t jump on my iPhone and fire up either of these websites because there is no JAVA support on the iPhone. Other smart phones might have the same issue. There is an alternative at http://time5.nrc.ca/webclock_static_e.shtml. This shows the static time that should be all you to see the time fairly accurate.

So there you have it. No need to sync your camera to the data logger. Just sync your camera to the most accurate time you can find and you will do just fine. If your data logger has the ability to drop markers a good idea is to drop your marker right when you take your first photo. Use that marker as a reference point to check if you are off on your time when you get back to your computer and start processing your images. Almost all the geo tagging software out there allows you to offset the timestamps when you tag your photos against the track your data logger collected.

I hope this saves someone a few head scratches when they try sync their data logger with their camera.

Click the image to see the pindrops.

Also the bug from last night’s addition of the flickr description is fixed. Unless someone can find some new ones I think we are back to good.

I hope to start seeing some pindrops with descriptions added now. Next up on the plate is updating your pindrops title and descriptions without having to delete and add them again.

Don’t delete your pindrops and re-add them just to get the descriptions showing up. I will create an update script and add it to the site as a UPDATE option. This UPDATE page will get your photo titles and photo description and update the database with your latest details. This will make it very easy for you. So get adding your descriptions.

Going forward I encourage you to add relevant titles and detailed descriptions to your photos before pin dropping them. If it is worth adding to Pindropr then it is work adding a title and description.

Also you are limited to 500 characters on your descriptions regardless of how much text you can enter on flickr.

Here is a screenshot and link to pindrop with a description added.

http://www.pindropr.com/?pin=416

Sorry for the inconvenience but we are still in beta.