Unrecognized camera...

[goislands]

I have reported this for several months already to support@pbase.com, each time I got the automated case number and a reply email, but so far there is no change in this seemingly easy to fix problem:
The Panasonic Lumix FZ18 will not be not automatically recognized by Pbase as a known camera. Probably because the maker and model as recorded by the camera are "Panasonic DMC-FZ18" whereas Pbase database expects "Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18." On the Panasonic camera maker statistics page http://www.pbase.com/cameras/panasonic this model and several other recent cameras appear without any user count, maybe for the same reason. I am posting this here instead of another message to support@pbase.com in the hope that someone at Pbase will spot and fix this issue.

Thanks in advance,
Thomas

[dang]

Hi Thomas,
I'd imagine (from reading the below post) it might be a little time before these type problems are dealt with:
http://forum.pbase.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=35947&start=60

nooutlet
PBase Admin wrote:

Re: Piclens from Cooliris.com
Post July 12th, 2008, 7:29 pm

First of all, some more popular photo sites were enabled by PicLens interpreting the page instead of the site creating a feed for PicLens to read. Flickr is owned by Yahoo and PicLens uses a Yahoo Media RSS feed, so Flickr probably didn't have too much trouble getting one set up, did they? Even still, I've had PicLens act strangely on Flickr and SmugMug.
Certainly, PicLens isn't so tough to enable that the wait has been all about that though. Part of it was that the pages on the development servers are updated as part of a major overhaul of all of PBase. So when I made it work, I made it work for the new version which isn't ready to release to you guys yet. Another thing is that we weren't sure we wanted to enable PicLens for technical reasons. If you have PicLens installed on your browser while browsing a site with a PicLens RSS feed available, your browser will be made to read not just the feed, but every thumbnail in the feed(in order to match it with the thumbnails on the page and display the "Go" arrow over the thumbnail) whether or not you actually use PicLens on that site. If the gallery has 10 pages of thumbnails and you browse it page by page, each time you change the page, the feed gets read and each thumbnail gets read twice. That could mean a substantial increase in the number of requests from viewers with PicLens installed. I created a work around that reduces that increase to two requests when PicLens changed the symbol on the browser from a static icon to an icon that turns from gray to blue when there is a feed to read.
There was also a bit of discussion about whether enabling PicLens should be a choice that the gallery owner makes and whether it should be opt in or opt out.
Lastly,
I'm the one working on PicLens. I've also been working on the page for setting up printing of images without frames, working on getting these forums up and managing to keep them up and extracting EXIF for all the different types of cameras with different ways of filling in metadata. Some other sites have larger development teams from what I understand, but the delay has not been because it's all that difficult to set up.

In looking up how SmugMug was doing with their PicLens implementation, I found it painfully slow to navigate. Also, they don't seem to have it enabled on Popular Photos or things like that. I've set it up on our Popular Photos, Recent Updates, etc(not Random for technical reasons) in addition to Galleries and also I've set it up so that the thumbnail of sub-galleries has a "Go" button which takes you into PicLens in that sub-gallery.
I guess my answer is that we're a bit busy with main parts of our site so enabling third party enhancements is low on the list and when we do enable it, we want it to be the best implementation we can make without hurting server performance.

Nooutlet seems to have his hands full, and it's one of the projects he's working on.