Show off your newest Second Life postcards automagically
Posted on: September 15, 2008
Since I'm a SecondLifecaster, I <3 sharing where I've been around the grid. That means I used a neat collection of tools to bring you what you see above! ^
Yes, it really shows the newest 100 pictures I've taken inworld. What's more, it gets automatically refreshed, meaning you don't have to do anything else but bookmark this page and keep coming back. Or see the original Flickr view if you prefer. Get mouse-overy and clicky to become browsalicious.
I haven't seen anyone else do that yet, but that's not because it's a bad idea. It has more to do with the process being somewhat opaque due to the multiple pieces involved. Once you know, it's pretty easy — I figured it out and did the hard work!
Here's how to get an automated snapshot widget like me:
- Make sure you have a Second Life virtual world account. (If you don't have one yet, feel free to take your time and enjoy the sights… explore around and become comfy!)
- Sign up for Flickr.
- Sign up for an account at a Second Life photo-sharing site which supports SL postcard-to-Flickr. SLBuzz, Snapzilla, blogHUD, and Koinup all support this. (Any others?)
- Setup your chosen photo-sharing site and grant permissions there to access your Flickr account.
- In Second Life, click the Snapshot button on the toolbar. Send a postcard to the correct email address(es) specified on the photo-sharing site, wait a few minutes tops, and check to see if the postcard shows up on Flickr. (If not, check the photo-sharing site's own repository, and look into what went wrong.)
- Allow dopiaza's Flickr Set Manager to access your Flickr account, too. Create a new set to be autogenerated there with the proper settings: e.g., I chose "Type = Most Recent", 100 photos, and restricted it to photos with "secondlife, slbuzz" tags so only those pictures come through. Make sure "Automatically Regenerate" is set to "Yes"!
- Check out your new autoset. If all's good, head over to PictoBrowser, enter your Flickr name, choose the new auto-set in the list, and tinker with the controls. Get the embed code, and paste it in any supported webpage, like a blog post. As the set gets updated daily, the PictoBrowser will reflect that without you needing to do anything — beautiful, eh?
Related tutorials (I knew making these would come in handy someday!):
- Send enhanced postcards to Flickr with SLBuzz
- Very nice, clean Flickr embed tool: PictoBrowser
- How to send a postcard in Second Life
And you may also want to see Torley's Guide to High-Quality Photography, which I think is great (and need to update for SL 1.21 coming soon). But I'm totally biased.
Trust me, once this is running for you, it's SO worth it. It requires little maintenance and is a really beloved thing to have! Simple benefit: makes it much easier to share your Second Life adventures and show off your eclectic discoveries.
I may come up with a more elegant way to display that widget (already, there's a smaller one in my box o' RANDOM FUN which reads from the same data), and perhaps it warrants its own special page link in the upper-right. We'll see. Better yet, got ideas? Share them with me!
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September 15th, 2008 at 11:04 PM PDT
This is soooo slick.
September 15th, 2008 at 11:56 PM PDT
With my luck I'll forget it's still up and running… kind of a hazard with my SL side job. XD I'll definitely try it out with an alt! Thanks and you Rock(man)!
September 16th, 2008 at 2:12 PM PDT
I'd been wondering how you got that "Taken by… at…" at the bottom of all your pics. Thanks for the tutorial.
September 16th, 2008 at 7:57 PM PDT
Thank you for explaining an easier way to put stuff on my flickr account. I am forever forgetting to update my photos on it & this will actually make it easier for me to do (completely addled brained..need all the help I can get.) Thanks!
September 17th, 2008 at 3:40 AM PDT
Great stuff Torley, working through all of this now and looking forward to taking more SL snapshots.
September 20th, 2008 at 2:43 PM PDT
=^_^=
Thanks for letting me know you find this helpful, it encourages me to share more in the future. *whirrr-click of a camera*
Let me know how it goes for you and if you have more questions!
November 11th, 2008 at 4:19 PM PST
I always save my photos as bmp to hard drive, in case I want to use them later to edit in Photoshop, etc. Creating "art" as opposed to just a random snap. But I find I never edit them, and I never get around to uploading them. And because of the dumb way SL names your pics (so that everything you take during that log in all says "Torley's Pink Chair" even though I have moved on to take other pictures), I don't even know where I took them or what they are, after a while. So if I take postcards instead, and upload automatically to Flickr and Koinup, will I still be able to get the original image back onto my computer, if I decide I want to edit it and do something more with it? If the answer is yes, you have made my life so much easier!
Princess Ivory
November 13th, 2008 at 8:09 PM PST
Princess Ivory - I copied one of my photos from Flickr 2 days ago and edited it, saved to HD and uploaded to a different site. My eye may not be the greatest, but it looked pretty good to me, I don't think the quality of the photo was reduced in the process.
November 14th, 2008 at 3:49 PM PST
@Princess: "Yes" to a certain degree, as Corcosman shares (thanks!). There WILL be some quality loss, since postcards are ALWAYS JPG right now. So saving to disk can still ensure the best format. What I've done on occasion, while kinda clunky, is: quickly do Ctrl-` to save snapshot to disk, and right after, send a postcard. That way, it goes to both places. Alas, the disk version doesn't get descriptively named, but it's saved me a few times when I was wondering "What the heck is this place?"