Updating website via picture phone?

[Mellowman]

Is it possible to easily update pictures on a website just using a
picture phone?

I'd like to take pictures using a picture phone and have them
transferred automatically to a specific webpage. I want to keep it
simple so would prefer not to have to do a lot of typing online, or
accessing web forms etc, hence email being the preferred method.

Any other suggestions welcomed if it involves pictures transferred via
picture phone (thinking of the PE800).

Thanks

David

[Tom Blench]

goo...@mellowman.co.uk (Mellowman) writes:

If you are reasonably technical you could send the SMS to an email
address and have some scripts unpack the picture and stick it on your
website - I know one person who has done this.

A better idea is for your network to offer you such a service - I
think a 'web gallery' was mooted by Orange Multimedia Operations
(Ananova as was), but I don't know if it's live. It strikes me as a
killer idea, and much better than peer-to-peer MMS. I imagine you
could go somewhere, take a load of pics and say 'look at my website',
rather than sending pics to the one other person you know with an MMS
phone!

Any takers?

Tom

[Albert]

>
> If you are reasonably technical you could send the SMS to an email
> address and have some scripts unpack the picture and stick it on your
> website - I know one person who has done this.
>
> A better idea is for your network to offer you such a service - I
> think a 'web gallery' was mooted by Orange Multimedia Operations
> (Ananova as was), but I don't know if it's live. It strikes me as a
> killer idea, and much better than peer-to-peer MMS. I imagine you
> could go somewhere, take a load of pics and say 'look at my website',
> rather than sending pics to the one other person you know with an MMS
> phone!
>

I have actually done this ... !! Forget the MMS /SMS stuff .. If you are
using a multimedia phone such as a P800 then just stick to plain old HTML..
Much easier to support and can be written and tested 'off air' in a standard
browser before testing it with the phone.

I wrote some PHP code on my site to accept the images, resize them for
display and index them too...
Using the email approach is far too complicated .. I just used a simple
upload form from the browser (see text).

However, what I did find is that the inbuilt browser on the P800 doesn't
handle forms correctly and had to use Opera (P800 version downloadable) as
the 'POST' method didn't work as I would have expected with the inbuilt
browser..

Unfortunately I don't have the code for this at hand anymore but I am sure I
will dig it out over the weekend.. It was one of those things I wanted to
try to see if it would work, then having tried it out I couldnt really see
any practical use for it so gave up on it.. The novelty soon wears off..
Believe me ... :-)

The upload code is based on a simple image upload form and is pretty much
cross-platform (the same form works from the desktop too) .. the only clever
bit I added was the PHP / GD-Lib stuff to process the uploaded images to
improve the layout and display quality and add a thumbnail page formatted
for the P800 display so I could check the online images and add narration
(again using a form method)..

:-)

[David G]

in article 3eb1d...@corp-news.newsgroups.com, Albert at
arse...@yahoo.com wrote on 2/5/03 3:35 am:

Thanks for these replies - very interesting!

Out of interest, I unearthed a website http://www.flexwindow.com/ that
allows for easy updates, including pictures, via email. I've been trying out
their free account and it works very well.

Still interested in the upload code though!

Cheers

David

[Ben]

> I have actually done this ... !! Forget the MMS /SMS stuff .. If you are
> using a multimedia phone such as a P800 then just stick to plain old HTML..
> Much easier to support and can be written and tested 'off air' in a standard
> browser before testing it with the phone.

Albert (? - i think, I got mixed up who was who...lol)

This sounds very cool.

We actually have an SMS gateway online and was looking for a means to
allow travellers to update blogs and upload images etc direct from
their phone to webspace provided by us while on holidays.

If you have that code lying around I'd definitely like to look at it.
If you don't mind of course. Would be very cool to see all this merged
in with our current service.

Cheers,

Ben
__________________
www.u-msg.com
b...@u-msg.com