Through the Zooomr Portal
Posted by briandh on August 27, 2006
I have just found a new feature in Zooomr – Portals.
These are actually very simple in principle but add huge possibilities and are such fun to use. Quite simply you can add any number of rectangular hotspots to your images, these hotspots can be linked to any of you other photos and have a bit of text beside them.
As the user moves the mouse over your image the hotspots become visible and the really clever bit is that it isn’t simply “click here to go to the other picture” – you actually get the other picture embedded in the rectangular space you marked out and the user can pan around the image by moving the mouse. If they want they can then click through to the next image.
That was a lot of words to describe something that is very intuitive to use.
The artistic possibilities are endless but I have a couple of suggestions:
- It would be good to be able to link through to other peoples images, that way you could easily put together collaborative pieces of work that are currently only possible by copying images.
- Zooomr already has the Zooomtrations feature, which allows you to associate a sound snippet with an image – it would be great if you could link other Zooomtration sound snippets to portals.
In playing around I have put together a little tour of Iona Abbey, it is a very literal use of the Portal technology, if you click on the above link to Zooomrs own blog on the subject you can get to some far more artistic ones.
Your tour of Iona Abbey starts here:
carina said
This may be a dumb question, but how do you create portals? I have been all over the Zooomr site but I can’t seem to find the option to create them. I was wondering if you had to be a “Pro 4 Lifer” to make them or if anyone could… if you could get back to me on this, I would greatly appreciate it! Thanks!
briandh said
Creating a Zooomr portal:
1. You have to be signed in and looking at your own pictures.
2. Go to the full page for the image.
3. Above the image display, just under the image title, are a set of clickable options, in the middle is “Add portal” – click it.
4. A small box appears which you can drag the corners of to size the “portal”.
5. Click “Choose a photo” and you get presented with much the same display as whn you GeoTag images – pick the image that will appear in the box (and will be navigated to when the user clicks it).
6. After “CONINTUE”ing the selected photo you can enter a little textual note. I’ve found that it forgets the text if you type it in first and then choose the photo.
7. Choose “Save” and you are finished.
I think anyone can do it – I don’t think its just Pro’s.
carina said
Thanks a bunch!