Atpic General Help

How do I contact Atpic?

Please use our online contact form.
There exists also several groups where you can discuss about Atpic. The groups are available in two languages: English and French. The details of the English speaking group are available below:

Subscribe to group "atpic" Browse Archives at groups.google.com

The details of the French speaking group are available below:

Abonnement au groupe "atpic-fr" Consulter les archives sur groups.google.fr

How do I contact an Atpic member?

Please use the Private Message (PM) system. In the default templates, there is a link on each user's page (artist, gallery or picture page) to send this user a PM.

Who is behind Atpic?

Atpic is mainly a one person work. Atpic has been created in 2003 by Alex Madon. It is being administrated and maintained by himself. All Atpic users that sent ideas/suggestions and those that helped in translation the web interface in other languages are warmly thanked.

Where is Atpic operated from?

Atpic is currently operated from France. As its creator has long history of travelling and living in various countries, it may be operated from another country in the future. Atpic servers are spread over the planet.

Is there a venture/company behind Atpic?

No, not for the moment.

Why is Atpic free?

Atpic started as a voluntary work to allow Internet surfers to use free web space that was available on a dedicated server in 2003. Because the author of Atpic was more interested in technical issues of providing web space, than by making money, the access to the site has been kept free.

Why don't I find any commercials on Atpic?

The goal is to provide a high quality hosting solutions for pictures and videos.

How can't you lose money with Atpic?

Well, we do lose money : we rent servers and have no income.

Will Atpic remain free forever?

No. Because of the success of Atpic, we will probably need to ask a financial participation to Atpic users to keep it running. If you don't like that idea of having to pay one day some few bucks for this service, so simply don't use it. The setup of a financial participation will be communicated in advance anyway, in order to allow users to move their data from Atpic to another provider of their choice.

Are my picture safe?

Because security has a cost and this service is free, the security is far from high. Atpic users should backup their own data.

Can I link to pictures hosted on atpic from forums?

Yes. Atpic does not limit hotlinking to the documents hosted on our servers. To hotlink from a forum to a picture use the raw based URL. It is of the form below:
http://uUID.direct.atpic.com/GID/Secret/PID/Resolution.Extension
where UID is the user ID, GID the gallery ID, Secret is the secret string (0 if the document is public), PID is the document ID, Resolution is the document resolution and Extension is the document extension. The direct link to a document is reminded below it.

Why should I use the raw URLs and not the URL displayed by my web browser?

Atpic use load balancing. This means that a picture is hosted on a particular server, according to servers disk usage. Atpic does not guarantee that the true URL will not change in the future. On the other hand, Atpic guarantees that if you use the http://raw URL, then our server will always return the true URL.

Can I protect my pictures using a password?

Yes. Atpic provides a protection mechanism that makes difficult for non authorized web surfer to view your documents. Atpic chose a mechanism based on a secret key. To view protected galleries, the web surfer needs to know the secret key. URL of protected galleries are of the following types:
http://gallery.atpic.com/galleryID/secretKEY
URL of protected pictures are of the following types:
http://pic.atpic.com/picID/secretKEY
http://pic.atpic.com/picID/resolution/secretKEY

Why did Atpic chose a secret key based protection system?

This protection mechanism is easier to scale than a login/password mechanism.

Is such a private key protection system as efficient as a login/password system?

Yes. It is mathematically more difficult to find a 30 characters secret string than a couple of 8 characters username and 8 characters password.

What do I need to tell to my friends for them to be able to view my private galleries?

You just need to tell them the Gallery ID and the secret key. You can just cut and paste in an email the URL of the private gallery.

When should I chose to make a gallery private?

Atpic prefers that users make their photographies available to all viewers. So, anybody could learn and comment your work. When you post your pictures on newgroups, it is generally a bad idea to use the private feature. Indeed, Internet search engines will one day go through the link and the secret key will then be known by the whole Internet.

How does it work?

There is no software limit in the number and size of the picture you can upload.
You can upload your pictures using the HTTP protocol (POST method).
Images are automatically thumbnailed and scaled to various smaller sizes depending on the original size of the picture.
- if the largest side of the original image is greater than 1024 pixels, then a scaled image fitting into a 1024 square is created.
- if the largest side of the original image is greater than 600 pixels, then a scaled image fitting into a 600 square is created.
When you open an account, you are also assigned a unique userID, which is an integer (a number between 1 and 4294967296); You can refer to your homepage by using this userID:
```
http://www.atpic.com/userID
```
or simply:
```
http://atpic.com/userID
```
You can classify your pictures using galleries; Each gallery has also a unique galleryID. You can refer to your gallery using the following URL:
```
http://gallery.atpic.com/galleryID
```
Each picture has a unique picID. To refer to a picture embedded in a HTML page you should use:
```
http://pic.atpic.com/picID
```
or
```
http://pic.atpic.com/picID/0
```
(0 meaning zero scaling, i.e., the original size) This URL refers to the original picture you uploaded (the largest size). To refer to the scaled images
- if the largest side of the original image is greater than 1024 pixels, the corresponding scaled image is at:
```
http://pic.atpic.com/picID/1024
```
- if the largest side of the original image is greater than 600 pixels, the corresponding scaled image is at:
```
http://pic.atpic.com/picID/600
```

To refer to the JPG file directly use:

for the original image:

http://uUID.direct.atpic.com/gID/Secret/picID/0.Extension

for the 1024 scaled image if available:

http://uUID.direct.atpic.com/gID/Secret/picID/1024.Extension

for the 600 scaled image if available:

http://uUID.direct.atpic.com/gID/Secret/picID/600.Extension

Note that we have several image servers: pic0.atpic.com to pic9.atpic.com. When referring to your pictures, you should never use those name directly, but use the standard pic.atpic.com server name instead. This server redirects automatically the use to the right server.

WIKI translation tool. How to participate?

Why a collaborative tool?

For the internationalization of our web site, we decided to use a collaborative model: the interfaces of the site is internationalized by the international users. This scheme has several advantages. The main advantage is that is shifts the work load to a team of several hundreds of potential translators from the initial developer team (well actually one and a half person!).
The other advantage is that also the developer team has some international languages knowledge, we could never master as many languages our users do master.

How does it work?

Each document has an URL. For instance, the URL of atpic home page is:

http://atpic.com

There is an international version available for each language by inserting a two character language code after the root of the URI (the part of the URL after the web site name). We will see later the two character codes for the various languages, but let us say now we want to access to the French version of the previous URL. We just have to point our web browser to the following URL:

http://atpic.com/fr

How to participate?

Now to actually participate to the translation work, the interested users should prepend the character string "wiki" to the URI. For example to translate in French the atpic home page, one should go to the URL:

http://atpic.com/wiki/fr

To translate other pages, one should navigate the site form the home page. Note that some URL use classic variable passing, inserting a string like "wiki=1&setlang=fr". If you navigate from the home page, you should not have to worry about that.
In wiki mode, each user can modify the text of the document by clicking on the blue link marked by a LANG tag. The string that can be translated in between brackets [ and ]. The integer following LANG is the string unique ID and the two letters after the = is the language code.
If the string to translate is in red, this means that no translation is available.
If it is in green, this means there is at least one translation available.
For each string to translate there can be several possible translation. generally speaking, the last one is displayed on the web page.
By clicking on the LANG link, you can insert a new translation and/or see the translation history for this string.
To see the effect of the translation on the page, you have to press the "Reload Page" button of your browser. Note: The is also a field called "My Artist ID is". This corresponds to your atpic user ID. It is useful to know who translated what. That's the reason why I suggest you open a (free) atpic account first. Then this field should be filled automatically using a cookie stored on your hard drive.
Note: In order to translate the page title, the following trick has been used: The text of the page title is repeated in the BODY of the HTML page. This allows to use the same technique, with a LANG link described above.
Note: There is no way to delete a translation you just entered. If you made a mistake, just enter the correct one; it will overwrite the previous one.
Note: To make the translation work easier, the text to translate are usually whole sentences and not part of sentences. Exceptions are the titles, where grammatical correctness is less important. A page listing all the sentences used in Atpic is also available at the URL below:

http://atpic.com/wiki_list.php

It is handy to see at a glance what is missing to achieve the full translation of the site into one language. It also allows to translate a sentence where the link in the page in wiki mode does not work. (this is the case in XHTML pages where the sentence to translate is inside a link, i.e. inside an anchor 'a' tag.

Two characters languages codes

The system could theoretically support an unlimited number of languages. If your mother language is not listed below, and you would like to see your own language in atpic interface just contact us, and we well add a link to it here.

ar	Arabic
zh	Chinese (Simplified)
hk	Chinese (Hong Kong Cantonese)
tw	Chinese (Traditional)
cs	Czech
da	Danish
nl	Dutch
en	English
fi	Finnish
fr	French
de	German
el	Greek
he	Hebrew
hu	Hungarian
it	Italian
ja	Japanese
ko	Korean
no	Norsk
pl	Polish
pt	Portuguese
ro	Romanian
ru	Russian
sk	Slovak
sl	Slovenian
es	Spanish
sv	Swedish
tr	Turkish

Note that as we use UTF8 encoding for all our pages, you should be able to input even non Latin alphabet based languages.

Atpic Video upload help

Supported video formats

Supported video formats are :

mpg (video/mp2p)
mpg (video/mpeg)
mov (video/quicktime)
avi (video/x-msvideo)
asf (video/x-ms-asf)
mp4 (video/mp4)

Features

A video frame is automatically extracted from each video uploaded to a gallery.
You thus don't have to upload a video and then upload a picture representing the video.
You can mix pictures and videos in a same gallery

How do I upload my videos ?

Uploading a video to our servers is similar to uploading pictures to our server.
Just log into your account with your username and password.
You can upload the videos using the HTTP protocol (web interface) or the FTP protocol.
To upload your video using the web interface, just create or select the gallery you would like your videos shows up.
The click on the link "add a picture to this gallery".
Select the video file your your local hard drive and submit the form.
For large files, the ftp method should be prefered.
The limit of HTTP uploads is: 8M
The limit of FTP uploads is: 100M.
Click here for more information on how to upload files by ftp.

Atpic Picture transformation

Are there any image transformation tool available?

You uploaded a picture but forgot to rotate it before ? You uploaded your full CF Memory from your camera to Atpic web space and need to rotate those portraits... No problem, Atpic allows to transform your picture from your web interface, and it is easy! Each picture is between those two arrows:

Pressing on the first arrow will rotate your picture 90 degrees anti-clockwise. Pressing on the second arrow will rotate your picture 90 degrees clockwise. It is that easy!
Note that when you rotate a picture, it will get a new PicID. We simply change the name (the ID) of the picture to avoid getting a old cache of the picture (the picture is actually rotated on our server, but your browser does not see it rotated).All other properties are copied to the new ID, including the priority field.
The time needed by our computer to rotate an image depends on the size of the original image. For very high resolution images, this time can exceed one second.

Atpic ftp upload help

Why to upload by ftp?

Atpic allows you to upload files to our servers one by one, using the HTTP protocol. Sometimes, it is faster to upload several files using one command. FTP (file transfer protocol) is a protocol specialized in transferring files between computers. Like HTTP, FTP is a standard. There exist numerous ftp client programs, just as there exist numerous HTTP clients (like MS Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Galeon, Konqueror). Each atpic account comes with a ftp account. You can then upload several files at a time, and then enter the file information (title, description) later.

How to upload by ftp?

What is my ftp account information (servername, username and password)?

To upload by ftp :
Connect to your ftp server. As atpic runs different ftp servers, you need to know on what ftp server you are. Your ftp server is given in your account page. The ftp server name should have the form below:

uUID.direct.atpic.com

where UID is the user ID.
Your FTP username is the same as your Atpic username.

The password or the ftp server is the same as the password used to log into your atpic account.

What software can be used?

To upload to our ftp server, you need a program generically called a "ftp client".
For MS Windows operating systems, a good free client is filezilla: http://filezilla.sourceforge.net
For Linux operating systems, you can use the ftp command line client or the gftp graphical interface.

Limitations on ftp accounts

The goal of atpic ftp accounts is to upload faster your files to present them on atpic web site. Thus, there exist some restrictions on what you can do with those ftp accounts.

For security reasons, files that are not of the authorized types (JPG) are not seen by the web picture management program.
A consequence is that you should not create subdirectories because you then could not move files in your your atpic public zone.
The size of your ftp zone is limited to 100Mb.
You should avoid to upload files whose name contains spaces and non ascii characters.

Atpic RSS feeds

What are RSS feeds

RSS is a Web content syndication format. Its name is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. It is an open communication standard based on XML.

Why does Atpic provide RSS feeds?

In a site like Atpic, RSS feeds could be used for instance in the following cases:

You want to see in a RSS reader (see next below) what are the last picture posted on Atpic, what are the last pictures posted by your friends, the last pictures added to a particular gallery, etc...
You want to include easily the pictures you uploaded to Atpic into other web sites. You can have for instance added a gallery about your last hollidays, and you have a web blog that talks about it. The use of RSS allows you to include the links to the pictures in an easy and safe way. You just have to enter the description of the picture one time, and can reuse the information elsewhere! Interesting, isn't it? Moreover, you don't have to worry about picture ID changes and URL changes: Atpic will always feeds your programs with the up to date information, after a small refreshing delay.

How can I read the feeds?

You can use RSS feeds reader. Some very good free programs are avalaible depending on the operating system you use. Some of the most famous are:

For the Linux operating system: Straw, Liferea, Mozilla Thunderbird, ...
For the MAC operating system: Safari, ...
For the MS Windows systems: FeedReader, ...

What RSS feeds does Atpic provide?

Atpic provides the feeds below, where the URL is the URL where to get the feed. In the URL GID is the Atpic unique gallery ID and UID is the unique user ID.

Feeds for content:
- Follow the last public pictures:
```
http://atpic.com/rss.php
```
- Follow the last public pictures belonging to an artist:
```
http://atpic.com/rss.php?uid=UID
```
  Example:
```
http://atpic.com/rss.php?uid=1
```
- Follow the last public pictures belonging to a gallery:
```
http://atpic.com/rss.php?gid=GID
```
  Example:
```
http://atpic.com/rss.php?gid=1
```

Feeds for comments:

Follow the last comments in the forum:

http://atpic.com/rss.php?type=forum

Example:

http://atpic.com/rss.php?type=forum

Follow the last comments about an artist or user:

http://atpic.com/rss.php?type=forum&uid=UID

Example:

http://atpic.com/rss.php?type=forum&uid=1

Follow the last comments about a gallery:

http://atpic.com/rss.php?type=forum&gid=GID

Example:

http://atpic.com/rss.php?type=forum&gid=1

Follow the last comments about a picture:

http://atpic.com/rss.php?type=forum&pid=PID

Example:

http://atpic.com/rss.php?type=forum&pid=1

Atpic Slide Show

Because very high resolution images could be slow to download, the slide show is only available at the smallest resolution (600 pixels on the largest side). If you have a small screen, you can have a larger view in your web browser in setting it in 'full screen' mode. In mozilla and firefox web browsers, switching between full screen mode and normal mode can be achieved by pressing the F11 key.

Atpic Flash Slideshow

Why a slideshow written in Flash?

Atpic has two slideshows: one uses the Javascript technology and the other uses the Flash technology. Flash technology has several advantages:

It can be made very interactive.
Animations are programmed naturally. This allows us to provide several transition mode between pictures.
It can easily be embedded withing an HTML code. A HTML page like a javascript slideshow can also be embedded within an HTML document using a <iframe> tag but the visual effect is less satisfactory.
The scaling of images is performant.

How do I call the slideshow?

You can call the slideshow from your gallery page. There is a link to the slideshow from it. You can also call directly the flash slideshow by its URL.

 http://flash.atpic.com/GID
 http://flash.atpic.com/GID/resolution
 http://flash.atpic.com/GID/resolution/secret

In the URLs above, GID is the gallery unique ID, and the optional parameteres are the desired resolution of the slideshow and the secret string protecting the gallery. The resolutions available are:

600: This will call images at the 600 pixels resolution with control bottons above the images.
350: This will call images at the 350 pixels resolution with control bottons above the images. This is the default resolution of the slideshow.
160: This will call images at the 160 pixels resolution. Note that at this resolution, no control button are presented. The slideshow can be controlled using the key bindings. The slideshow is started automatically.

Below are the URL for the gallery ID 1 at the thre resolutions: 600, 350 and 160 pixels:

How do I control the slideshow?

The slideshow at larger resolution comes with control buttons: The faster and slower buttons control the speed of the image changes. The delay between images is displayed in milliseconds on the left hand side top corner. The transition mode is controlled by a button. A click on the transition mode button will change the transition mode to the next mode in a cycle. The transition modes are:

fade: The next image will be faded into the previous image.
none: The next image will replace the previous one.
slide: The next image will push the previous image to the left or the right depending on the slideshow direction.

The slideshow is not started automatically except in the 160 pixels resolution mode. The start button should be pressed to start the show. A manual display of the pictures can be achieved using the previous and next buttons. Note that these buttons also invert the direction of the show. A click on the image will open an HTML document containg the picture at the 600 pixels resolution.

Are there any key bindings available?

Atpic flash slideshow does provide key bindings. These can be used when preferred to the buttons or when the buttons are not displayed (like the 160 mode). The key bindings are:

right arrow, up arrow, page up: equivalent to the next button.
left arrow, down arrow, page down: equivalent to the previous button.
space: stops/starts the slideshow.
o: open an HTML page including the picture at the 600 pixels resolution.
+ or f: increases the speed of the show (display the documents faster).
- or s: decreases the speed of the show (display the documents slower).
n: uses the next transition mode available.

How do I embed a slideshow in an HTML document?

The flash slideshow allows you to include very easily your picture in any HTML document This can be used for instance if you own a web site hosted on another web server. Below are three examples of flash embedding using the <embed> tag.

This calls the slideshow at 600 pixels resolution. Note that the height of the slideshow window in the maximum height of the pictures (600 pixels) plus the number of pixels needed to display the buttons and Atpic link (52 pixels).

<embed src="http://flash.atpic.com/1/600" width="600" height="652"/>

This calls the slideshow at 350 pixels resolution.

<embed src="http://flash.atpic.com/1/350" width="350" height="402"/>

This calls the slideshow at 160 pixels resolution. It also changes the background color using the bgcolor parameter.

<embed src="http://flash.atpic.com/1/160" width="160" height="160" bgcolor="#ffffff"/>

Styling help

How do I control the way my pages are presented?

Style control is base on two technologies: CSS and templates. CSS is a web standard and templates syntax is proper to Atpic. More information about those technologies are provided in other section below. We present here some ideas to CSS and templates. In the next questions of this section, we use the words style and templates without distinction.

I like how a page is presented. How can I present my pages in a similar way?

Looking at what other other users did is a good way to begin to learn the style management possibilities of the Atpic. If you would like to know what style and templates a page uses, just go to the URL below, enter the document ID and submit the form.
http://atpic.com/styleinfo.php

What are frozen styles?

After some time, we block updates on style, because other users may use the style and we want to protect other users to see changes in their pages due to the changes to a style they do not own but that they use. The style is then called frozen. If you are the author of a style which has been frozen and you want to modify it, then you will need to create a new style, copy the content of the old style into the new style an do your modifications. Atpic members should use only frozen styles. Atpic started as a voluntary work to allow Internet surfers to use free web space that was available on a dedicated server in 2003.

CSS help

What are CSS?

CSS is a W3C standard. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. It is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents.

What are Atpic CSS features?

Atpic provides very advanced, yet simple, CSS management possibilities. The site has a database of styles. Each style has its own ID, an integer. Every registered Atpic user can add a new style. Style created by one user can be used by other users. Style can be updated by the author of the style, unless the style is frozen.

How can I add several styles?

On the contrary to some other sites, we allow cacading our styles. Indeed, you can add several CSS ID to a gallery or a picture. You just have to separate the CSS ID by a non integer character, for instance a coma. For instance, if your CSS ID string is 1,25,60 this means that your page will call successively the styles in the order they are given. The style 1 could thus define all the colors of the page. The style 25 could define all the fonts used in the page. The style 60 could be a short style redefining the colors defined in style 1, just for the title of the page.

Where do I see existing styles?

When loged into your acount you have a link to the CSS management pages at the bottom of your management page.

Template help

What are Atpic templates?

Before proposing templates, we had requests from users to modify the way pages were presented. Typical requests were:

On my gallery page, there is a link allowing people to post comments, I dont want that.
On my picture page,there is a link allowing people to vote for my picture, I dont want that.
On my picture page,there is a link allowing people to vote for my picture, I dont want that.
I do not like the multilingual navigation links. I and am only interested in language XY.
I and am only interested in language XY. I am interested only in having links to the highest resolution available..

To answer those requests, we decided to introduce Atpic templates. A template is a text field that can be edited from the management interface. A template contains a sequence of Atpic variables possibly mixed with some simple HTML and user defined variables.

What are Atpic variables?

Atpic variables are defined by Atpic developpers. There is already a long list of predefined Atpic variables. Their name begin with atpicvar. Atpic variables are called in templates writing their names between brackets [ ]. Example: [atpicvar_gallery_title]. The value of an Atpic variable is a piece or block of HTML code. Using those variables, you can control how HTML code will be output. You simply create your page using predefined blocks. We think this is a very powerfull way of writing HTML. Atpic does the dirty and tedious work of defining and giving a value to variables specially defined for picture presentation and Atpic members use them. If you have ever tried to write a program to manage pictures, you probably understand what we mean by dirty and tedious. To us this is a really interesting alternative to writing your own HTML code, without having to loose the ability to control exactly how you want your page to appear.

Where can i find the list of available Atpic variables and their description?

This list can be found at the following URL: http://atpic.com/skin_doc.php Also, the name of the variable used in a page in written in a HTML comment. You can thus click on the VIEW PAGE SOURCE button (or CTRL+U in Mozilla) of your web browser and view the names of the variables and the corresponding HTML code.

If you do not specify templates when configuring your object (home page, gallery or picture), then they will be presented using Atic default templates and styles.
The meaning of the variables is detailed in the skin and template writer documentation.
The default template for the home page is:


[atpicvar_head]

[atpicvar_navigation_top_links]
[atpicvar_navigation_lang_links]
[atpicvar_title]
[atpicvar_artist_galleries]
[atpicvar_description]
[atpicvar_home_newskin]
[atpicvar_home_private]
[atpicvar_pm]
[atpicvar_comment]

The default template for the gallery is:


[atpicvar_head]
[atpicvar_title]
[atpicvar_navigation_top_links]
[atpicvar_navigation_lang_links]
[atpicvar_by]
[atpicvar_artist_galleries_path]
[atpicvar_artist_galleries_below]
[atpicvar_description]
[gallery_number_slide_rss]
[atpicvar_home_newskin]
[atpicvar_gallery_thumbnails]
[atpicvar_pm]
[atpicvar_comment]
[atpicvar_javascript_preload]

The default template for the picture is:


[atpicvar_head]


[atpicvar_navigation_top_links]
[atpicvar_navigation_lang_links]
[atpicvar_by]
[atpicvar_gallery]
[atpicvar_pic_other_previousnext]
[atpicvar_one_document]
[atpicvar_artist_galleries_path]
[atpicvar_artist_galleries_below]
[atpicvar_pic_other]
[atpicvar_pm]
[atpicvar_comment]
[atpicvar_vote]

[atpicvar_javascript_preload]

CAPTCHA help

What is a CAPTCHA?

According to the wikipedia, a CAPTCHA (an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human.

Why and where Atpic uses CAPCHAs?

When accepting comments from non members, we uses a CAPCHA in the form to avoid robots posting spamming messages that will appear on the forum pages and in the message sent to the oner of the page. Below is an example of image used in Atpic to tell Computers and Humans Apart:
captcha

We hope it is not too difficult for you to read the text in the image but it is difficult to robots to read it. This system has noticeably reduced the amount of spam posted on Atpic. We suggest you report any abuse to Atpic using the contact page.

Folksonomy help

What are folksonomies?

A folksonomy is an Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels (or tags) that categorize content. This contrasts with a Taxonomy (from Greek verb tassein = "to classify" and nomos = law, science, cf "economy") where often the classification is hierarchical and unique.

What is web 2.0?

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways. Below are some examples of the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0:

directories (taxonomy)	-->	tagging (folksonomy)
Britannica Online	-->	Wikipedia
content management systems	-->	wikis

Web 2.0 is a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes. Tim O'Reilly's definition of Web 2.0: "the network as platform" Atpic use Web 2.0 concept mainly in content tagging and in the wiki based translation of the site.

What are broad and narrow folksonomies?

The broad folksonomy has many people tagging the same object and every person can tag the object with their own tags in their own vocabulary (Del.icio.us is an example). A narrow folksonomy is the result of one person categorizing an item (Flickr is an example). See also our geotagging FAQ.

How are tags used in Atpic?

Atpic uses abroad folksonomy. This means that any Atpic user cn tag any picture made by any other atpic user. The tagging of picture is not reserved to the author of the picture. This has many advantages. Any user tagging a picture shows he has interest in the picture This benefits the tagger as he cn then locate rpidly the picture he sw in the past. This is a kind of clever bookmarking, extly as in del.icio.us This benefits the communauty as it can be used to sort documents by popularity. The other advantage is that the relevance of tagging is improved: each tag has now a weight. If in the narrow folksonomy, 100 pictures were tagged by their author with the tag blue, it is very difficult to present the documents in the order of their relevance. On the other hand, in the broad folksonomy, if 50 tagger tagged the same image with the word blue, and only the author of another image tagged it with the word blue, then one can sy that the firt document is much more likely to be an example of an image containg the concept blue. This again benefits the author of the dcument because other people helps him in the doument classification and benefist also the community because it allow a much more accurate search of all the images in the community.

How are tags used in Atpic?

Any Atpic user can tag a document by clicking on the Tag this link. Authentication is made by a cookie; You thus need to enable cookie support to use tagging. The three main Atpic objects (artist, gallery and picture) can be tagged in Atpic.
If a gallery is tagged with one tag, then the tag is 'cascadated' to all the picture in the gallery. This means that when searching for this tag, all the pictures in the gallery will match the search. The weight of the matches is however loer than if the same tag had been entered in the picture itself. In the same way, tags on the artist are cascadeted to all the galleries of the artist and then cascadeted to the images in those galleries. The respective weights are: 1, 2, 4.
This means that a tagger tagging a picture with a tag will give the picture the equivalent of 2 taggers tagging the gallery with the same tag and the equivalent of 4 taggers tagging the artist page with the same tag.
The values of the weights may be changed in the future.

Filtering tags and view modes?

As Atpic uses a broad folksonomy, knowing the ID of the tagge document does not tell you who tagged the dcuemnt. Aptic provides thus several views that help you in filtering the tags. The filtering mode naming scheme is based on four groups of users. The Atpic community is the first group of user and is noted 'a' (for all). For a given user, the group of Atpic users less himslef is noted 'o' (for other). A group of one user is noted 'u' (for user). Finally, if you are identifie, you have access to a fourth group noted 'm' (for me). This allows you to view your private tags (or bookmarks). Based on those four groups, the following modes are available:

u2a	User to All
u2o	User to Other
u2u	User to User
o2u	Other to User
a2u	All to User
m2a	Me to All
m2o	Me to Other
m2m	Me to Me
o2m	Other to Me
a2m	All to me

In the questions below, we detil how those modes are use to filter tags data.

How did Atpic community tag Atpic documents?

This lists the tags used in Atpic.

http://tag.atpic.com

The URL below all the documents tagged with the tag TAG

http://tag.atpic.com/TAG

What are my bookmarks and other bookmarks?

The table below describes ho o access your bookmarks. Those are the bookmarks that any Atpic user can see (public bookmarks). Atpic decides that a picture or gallery bookmark is private if the gallery of the gallery the picture belongs to is private. All artist bookmarks (bookmarks about artist homepage) are public.

http://u2a.tag.atpic.com/UID	User to All: how user UID tags all Atpic documents?
http://u2o.tag.atpic.com/UID	User to Other: how user UID tagged other's documents?
http://u2u.tag.atpic.com/UID	User to User: how user UID tagged his documents?
http://o2u.tag.atpic.com/UID	Other to User: how other users tagged documents made by user UID?
http://a2u.tag.atpic.com/UID	All to User: how all atpic users (including user UID) tagged documents made by user UID?

The equivalent for the personnal bookmarks is:

http://m2a.tag.atpic.com/UID	Me to All: how did I tag Atpic documents?
http://m2o.tag.atpic.com/UID	Me to Other: how did I tag other's documents?
http://m2m.tag.atpic.com/UID	Me to Me: how did I tag my documents?
http://o2m.tag.atpic.com/UID	Other to Me: how did other tag my documents?
http://a2m.tag.atpic.com/UID	All to me: how did Atpic community (me included) tag my documents?

Popularity help

How does Atpic decides if document is popular?

Atpic's way of measuring the popularity of a document is based on a complex algorithm. Atpic gives a score to each document. The higher this score is, the most popular the document is. The algorithm is designed to let Atpic users to decided what doument is popular.

What is the Atpic popularity algorithm?

We do not give the details of the algorithm because we tune the algorithm regularly and because we do not want people to trick it. The algorithm tries to detect the interest of Atpic visitors and members in Atpic pictures by looking at the behaviour that document generates. This includes the way the document is tagged, who tag the document, who is the author of the document, the number of times a document has been viewed, the interest it generated in number of comments, the vote for the document. The algorithm is complex. It is designed to avoid artificial increase in popularity.

How can I make my documents more popular?

An interesting document should become popular naturally. The popularity algorithm is designed to avoid articial increases in a document's popularity. The popularity algorithm detects for instance artificial reloads of a page aimed at increasing the hit counter or serial votes by a same user for the same picture. However, tagging a document in a correct way will help a lot in getting a high popularity. Have other members or friends show their interest for your documents by adding comments, voting for them and tagging them. When other users tag your documents, this mean for us that they bookmark them to find them later, so this means they like them. Currently a great importance is given to a careful tagging of pictures, so please do not forget to tag your documents when you upload them to Atpic and do not forget to ask your friends to tag your documents especially the most interesting ones!

GeoTagging help

What is geotagging?

Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification to documents. In the context of images, it is interesting because it allows to find pictures taken in a given region.

How do I geotag my documents on Atpic?

The information you need to enter is the latitude and longitude. You can geotag your documents at two levels:

At the gallery level. Entering the latitude and longitude in the gallery insert of update HTML form will automatically cascade the geographical information to all the pictures in the gallery when searching.
At the picture level.

You can thus first geotag your galleries which is relatively painless and then, when you have more time geotag the pictures within each galleries, espcially those pictures taken far way from the gallery point.

How do I know the geographical coordinates of a point on the Earth?

There are in practive two main ways to know the coordinates of a point on the Earth.

When taking the picture, you record the coordinates of the point using a GPS device. There are currently very few cameras shipped with a GPS. There exists some specialized device rcording time and position. As most cameras now record the time of the shoot you can in theory associate the picture with the position.

After taking the pictures, once back home, you locate on a map the point where you took the picture. Atpic provides you with an interactive map that can be used for this purpose. It can be accessed at: http://atpic.com/map_helper.html The Yahoo! version, usefull for contrie not covered by Google like Central and South America or Asia, can be accessed at: http://atpic.com/map_helper_yahoo.html

Why does't Atpic retrieve info from the EXIF data?

There are currently few picture on Atpic containg geographical information in their EXIF data. If you would like to see such a feature implemented, please contact us. Ther is also the issue of privacy: we prefer that the user enters the data and see some privacy issues if the geographical data is uploaded automatically.

Where do I see my maps?

All Atpic geotagged documents can be searched at: http://maps.atpic.com An interface allowing alternative searches is available at: http://maps.atpic.com/map.php

uid: The map will show only documents belonging to user with user ID 'uid'.
gid: The map will show only documents belonging to the gallery with gallery ID 'gid'.
tags: The map will show documents containing the tag 'tags'.

Why is Atpic geotagging system not just an extension of Atpic tagging system?

The Atpic tagging system is a broad folsonomy meaning that anybody can tag a document. This has very interesting advantages when tags are words. Those advantages can be summerized by two mathematical properties long tails and power law. Those properties are based on the idea that most people will use the almost always the same words to qualify a picture. For instance people tagging a red Ferrari picture will probably enter very frequently the words: Ferrari and red. But some will enter also the model name 'testarossa'. Some will enter the color in their own language (for instance 'rouge' in French). Some other will also tag the image with the word 'outdoor' The mathematical properties mentionned above describe the distribution of the word apparition frequencies. In the context of geotagging, we do not see allowing other people to tag your own ocuments as a big advantage. The geotags just mean the coordinates of the point the picture was taken. Another reason is performance: At Atpic we do care about the speed of display of the page. Geographical data are numbers and the way to optimize search of numbers is much different from the way to optimize search of words. Atpic has developped a very fast latitude and longitude indexing system. We hope you will appreciate the speed in the display of the maps.

I want to create my own maps. Is there an API?

Atpic does provide you with a way to query geotagged documents. The API is based on the GeoRSS standard. The main program is available at: http://maps.atpic.com/rss.php?type=geo

x_min: The maximum longitude (a number between -180 and +180)
x_max: The mininum longitude (a number between -180 and +180)
y_min: The mininum latitude (a number between -90 and +90)
y_max: The maximum latitude (a number between -90 and +90)
uid: The RSS file will show only documents belonging to user with user ID 'uid'.
gid: The RSS file will show only documents belonging to the gallery with gallery ID 'gid'.
tags: The RSS documents will show documents containing the tag 'tags'.
vmode: This is the view mode. It tells the interface the way you want to group the images. The possible values are:
- cluster: The RSS file will group in a single 'item' several document grouping them in 'clusters'.
- point: Every single Atpic document will be within an single 'item' This mode is not recommended as it will slow down the display of maps.
The default value is: cluster.
qmode: This is the query mode. It tells the interface the way you want to query the Atpic document database. The possible values are:
- speed: The query will use a fast geographical index. This is a high performance search. The drawback of this kind of search is you will miss the last geotagged pictures. Indeed, a newly added picture can take up to 24 hours to be indexed.
- fresh: This search does not use the fast geographical index. The search is slower but you will be search all the tagged documents. This search is recommended when tagging your documents. In that context the search will be limited to your own documents and will thus be fast in both modes.
The default value is: speed.

Google.atpic.com

What is Google.atpic.com?

Google.atpic.com is a custom google page that queries google search servers but displays the search form and search results in a page containing Atpic pictures in background. It is a cool feature, isn't it? It is also the first attempt by Atpic to generate revenue: When a google.atpic.com user clicks on google sponsored links (google ads) part of the click revenue goes to Atpic.

How can I configure my google.atpic.com search page?

You have the choice between several modes:

You can choose to have as background a random Atpic image at the 1024 resolution by going at the URL below:
http://google.atpic.com
You can also change the resolution passing it after the forward slash like this:
http://google.atpic.com/[resolution]
http://google.atpic.com/600
http://google.atpic.com/0
http://google.atpic.com/[lang]
http://google.atpic.com/en
http://google.atpic.com/fr
http://google.atpic.com/artist/[artistid]
http://google.atpic.com/artist/1
http://google.atpic.com/gallery/[galleryid]
http://google.atpic.com/gallery/1
http://google.atpic.com/pic/[picid]
http://google.atpic.com/pic/1
http://google.atpic.com/[lang]/[type]/[id]/[resolution]