For iPhone/iPad users: full-screen browsing and Instagram

(Bruce Lewis) The next time you're looking at OurDoings photos on your iPad or iPhone, try this: Bring up Mobile Safari's menu and choose "Add to Home Screen". You'll get an icon on your home screen that lets you put that retina display to good use, showing your latest photos in high resolution. If you're in a place with low bandwidth, the old "Mobile Version" link is still there.

Instagram is a popular, free photo-sharing app on the iPhone. If you shoot with it, I suggest uploading the photos from your photo roll via Dropbox for the best resolution and most accurate dates. If you're an OurDoings veteran and just want to try out the real-time integration described here, create a separate site just for the instant medium-resolution photos, as I did with InstaBruce. That way if you later decide to put the full-resolution photos on your main OurDoings site you won't end up with a bunch of duplicates that OurDoings can't detect. The cool thing about this integration is that the photo gets posted immediately when you tap Done in Instagram.

If you aren't using OurDoings yet, but you're an Instagram user looking to try something new, follow these steps:

1. Start sending photos to OurDoings

  1. The easiest way to start from your iPhone is email-based registration, though other options are available on that same page.
  2. Wait for a "Welcome to OurDoings" email message. If it doesn't arrive in 2 minutes, check your spam folder.

2. Integrate with Instagram

  1. In the "Welcome to OurDoings" email click the "choose a password" link. Type a password twice.
  2. There is a series of links ("breadcrumbs") near the top of that page toward the left. Click the Edit link. On that page, click Site Integration (near the bottom, next to a puzzle-piece icon).
  3. On the Site Integration page, scroll down and check the Instagram box, and authorize OurDoings.

3. Watch your Instagram feed come in

Go back to the home page of your OurDoings site. Refresh every so often. Photos will come in, about 20 a minute. Click the "Get Updates" tab to see different available options like media/geoRSS, embedding in another web page, etc.  Pasting your m.xml RSS URL into Google Maps search can be fun.  In addition to geoRSS, photo metadata gets latitude, longitude and caption.  Give it a try!