Web Photocasts

Coronasync’s unique photocast capability allows you to sync and share your photos directly from your hard drive.

Photocasts are a new and exciting way to share your photos with friends and family on the Internet. Based on the RSS 2.0 standard, a photocast is really an RSS news feed that includes thumbnail images and links to photos hosted on a web server. Coronasync fully automates the process of photocast creation and hosting, while also enabling sync for your photo libraries.

In order to create a photocast, you will need to have the photos that will be included in your feed stored in some folder on your computer. The folder may include sub-folders, and virtually any standard image file format is allowed. Typically, the images would be in JPEG format from your digital camera.

Once the photo-containing folder that you wish to use has been identified, all you need to do is add the folder to Coronasync, and sync it. To add a new folder, select the Web Folders synclet in the toolbar and click “Add.” Give your folder an appropriate name, then select it from the list of folders to change the other settings. You must use the “Browse” button to tell Coronasync which folder on your local hard drive will be used to create the new Web Folder.

In order to give your new folder the special photocast format, simply select it from the “Format” drop-down list. This action will change the RSS feed associated with your folder so that it includes the thumbnail images and other attributes needed in a photocast.

In order to make your photocast visible to other Coronasync users, or to just anyone to whom you give the URL, you need to setup sharing. Click on the “Sharing” tab and select either group or public. If you are going to use group sharing, you will need to create a group and add its members. This is done via the Coronasync website, which you can launch by simply clicking on “Edit Groups.”

Once you have completed adjusting the settings for the folder, click the Sync button in the toolbar to upload your images. This is a standard syncing operation that you can repeat as often as needed (if you add new photos) and from any of your computers. Re-syncing will automatically update your RSS feed to include the new photos.

You should make note of the URL shown for the folder at the bottom of the Web Folders synclet settings. This is the URL that you should use when viewing the photos online or adding them to a feed reader. The image below shows how your photos will look when this URL is viewed in a web browser.

This image shows a sample of a photocast viewed using the Feed Demon RSS newsreader for Windows.

Also worth noting is that Coronasync photocasts are fully-compatible with the photocasts used in iPhoto on the Apple Macintosh. To use iPhoto, simple select the “Subscribe to Photocast” menu option and enter your Coronasync feed URL. The images will then appear within iPhoto as shown below.