Panoramio unusual location contest - new photos

New photos to the next Panoramio contest published on Unusual landscape photos by Allan Hansen. They all enter the Unusual Location category

1. Cuverville Island, Antarctica. The Gentoo penguin colony is worth a visit. The nearby Ronge Island with its glaciers makes a dramatic setting for this Antarctic visitor site.

This is one of my favorite spots in Antarctica


2. Brown Bluff on the Tabarin Peninsula in Antarctica. Adelie penguins entering the water.

Taken back in 2003. Unfortunate we did not go here in 2008 due to an accident on Paulet island and we had to rush to the Chilean base on South Shetland Island.


3. Salisbury Plain in the Bay of Isles, South Georgia Island. King penguin colony with over 200,000 birds.

Salisbury Plain is a fantastic place. The number of birds is staggering and the surrounding area is stunning.

Ane Holsaae graduated at the Glasgow School of Art

Ane Holsaae just graduated as BA(Hons) Fine Art Photography at the Glasgow School of Art. The Degree Show took place in the famous Mackintosh building desighed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh - an outstanding international architect, artist and designer.

See more at Fine Art Photography by Ane Holsaae.

The portrait of Girl in orange chair by Ane Holsaae will also be shown on The Glasgow Collective exhibition: Ane Holsaae Fine Art Photography in London.

The Glasgow Collective inaugral exhibition will be held at Shoreditch Town Hall, London, opening on the 10th July and running till the 17th July 2009. The event will showcase a wide range of contemporary practices that surf all Fine Art disciplines.
I wish I could attend the exhibition.

King penguins at South Georgia Island gallery on Smugmug

I did have some success in getting a HTML page and images indexed by Google with my gallery Adelie, Gentoo and Macaroni penguins in Antarctica.

I have tried the same with another gallery South Georgia Island and King Penguins but so far without any success. The last cache of the page is more than a month old.
Some of my most popular King penguin photos are shown on this page, so I am a bit disappointed right now. I have deleted the photo in the gallery and now it is all HTML. As this page is on my Smugmug site it means that I cannot any longer add comments. It is not shown in feeds anymore. I have also made the gallery invisible to Smugmug searches.
Hopefully this will help. The weeks to come will tell.

Update 2009-08-04:
Google has indexed this page on a number of different URL's (some of them not even belong to me, but to other Smugmug users), so I have deleted the gallery and started all over again. This time I have disabled the "Hello smuggers" before Google had the chance to index this gallery under other user accounts.
I hope that Smugmug will solve these serious SEO bugs soon - especially the duplicate page titles, the duplicate URL's and the duplicate Meta description issues.

Update 2010-10-12:
Smugmug have not solved these serious Search engine issues, and I do not think that they ever will.

Fast and friendly Smugmug support - Panoramio profile

I did find a small security issue with my smugmug images and reported it to Smugmug help desk. They responded very quickly and fixed the issue in no time - very impressive.
I even got a free year of Smugmug. I feel really honored.

Hi Allan,

Thanks for getting back to us. Yes, this is a big deal. You are
correct, even with URL manipulation, the largest size returned should be
the largest viewing size that you have set in the gallery customization
screen. This has been fixed now :-) If you clear your browser cache
and try again, you shouldn't be able to URL manipulate your way to an -O
sized image now.

Again, thank you for bringing this to our attention. It's users like
you that really help us find little bugs like this that can become big
problems. You just got a free year of SmugMug as a reward :-) Please
let us know if there's anything else we can do for you. Thank you, and
have a great day!

Josh
SmugMug Support Hero

I tried searching for my Panoramio profile for LichtenHansen - Allan Hansen on Google and found nothing.
Most (I think) other Panoramio users have their profile indexed - Why not mine?
It may be one of those 20 plus SEO issues that no one knows about.
Well, It would be a boring world if you knew all the secrets.

SEO friendly Image hosting site wanted

As an unknown photographer I am looking for an image hosting site which is up-to-date with the latest SEO-guidelines from Google and other search engines. It should also support geotagging of photos witch I believe will become very popular in the next few years.

I have looked at more than 20 reviews of photo / image hosting sites and none of them takes SEO (Search engine optimization) into consideration. It should be an important part of a review.

I have also checked more than 20 sites myself and most of them – if not all - fail to comply to even simple SEO guidelines such as Page title, Meta description, Header tags and Duplicate pages.

As a result only a tiny fraction of the images on those sites can be found on Google and other image search engines.

I still hope to find a SEO friendly image hosting site with geotagging facilities, but my hope fades.


Update: 2009-06-08

Just found Comparison of Image Sharing Sites for Potential SEO Benefit.
However, it is a bit outdated and not very trustworthy as Smugmug – which I know very well – are given way to many Green V’s (Should have Red X in “Unique page titles”, “Optimized URL’s”, “Add external link to photo page” (brake if you move photo to another gallery), “Allow user comments on photo pages” (implemented with Java and not visible to robots), “Img alt text” (only partly).

Missing in this comparison are important issues like “Meta description” , “duplicate pages” and success rate of indexed images in popular image search engines like Google and Yahoo.