Hot on the heels of the previous release:

1. Pictures initially uploaded in the original resolution will now show in Full HD quality;
2. The slideshow has been improved to plot all the geotagged pictures on the map;
3. We now detected when you upload the same picture multiple times, so you don’t run the risk of duplicating them if you have to re-upload a bunch of them;
4. Totally reworked picture selector for the journal to properly support lots of pictures;
5. Bunch of other little fixes and improvements.

We’ve already started work on the next release, lots of goodies planned for the next few weeks.

What’s new in this release:

• Faster loading of images, especially in the picture dialog. You should see most improvements when zooming in.
• Twice as fast upload in “Full resolution” mode.
• Several more feedbacks were addressed
• Nicer looking flyby, but we haven’t quite announced this feature, so I’ll stop here…

We are hard at work on two important new features, we hope to have news for you in about a week’s time.

What’s new in this release:

• New uploader with much faster image preview. Several folks complained that the preview is very slow on large directories containing high resolution images (say 5 mega-pixel or more).
• Nicer looking Profile pages. Better looking pages never killed anyone…

We are quite excited about the new uploader and we hope the upload process will be now a bit smoother for everybody.

Hi folks,

This is a big release for us, as it brings quite a few changes requested in the last little while. The big items are an upload process that’s a lot more user friendly, and the completion of privacy-related work started some time ago.

What’s new in this release:

• Picture-level privacy controls: you can now control the privacy setting on each individual picture. More on this below.
• Totally redesigned upload process: you can now upload directly from the My Trips page without having to first go into a trip.
• A new upload quality setting: folks that prefer larger, better looking pictures can now use the ‘optimal upload’ setting during the upload. This setting strikes a better balance between speed and quality if you have a fast internet connection.
• Faster than a greased weasel: we’ve made changes throughout the site to make it even faster to load. In particular the picture details dialog should feel lighter now.
• The picture tagging, picture upload, and trip join request dialogs have been reworked. They are officially sweet!
• You can now attach a message when uploading pictures into a trip where you are not a participant. It makes it easier for the recipient to understand what’s going on with the pictures you’ve sent.
• If you change the trip description several times in a row (e.g. fixing spelling mistakes), it will no longer clutter people’s news feeds with several messages.
• As always, quite a few of the feedbacks from our users have been addressed, and several rendering problems in IE6 have been fixed.

Picture level privacy

We now have picture-level privacy controls. This brings the privacy on Zipalong to a very good level of granularity that should please most users.

Here is a screenshot of the actual UI:

By default your pictures will have Default visibility, which means that it inherits the trip privacy setting. You can now change this to one of: Participants only, Friends only, Members only, and Public, independent of your trip setting. Marking the picture Public opens it up to be indexed by Google.

Upload quality

It turns out that some people like really fast uploads, others prefer larger, higher quality pictures. Since you can’t have both, you can now choose the one that’s right for you.

That is, you now have a choice between the already existing Fast upload, and the brand new Optimal upload:

The Fast upload gives you Facebook-like upload speed (at a bit better quality!), while the Optimal upload is similar to Flickr in terms of speed/quality balance.

You can of course still upload using Full upload to get your photos online at their original size/quality, but it is not really practical at today’s upload speeds if you have hundreds of photos to upload (e.g if you have a 7 mega-pixel camera it can take a few hours to upload 200 hundred pictures).

We recommend the Optimal upload, as it provides very good quality (in fact, as good as Full upload for online viewing) and fast upload speed.