Facebook – A Darker View

Manipulating EXIF Tags for the Mavic Air

One of the fun things you can do with the panorama images created by the Mavic Air drone is to upload them to places these images can be seen a wide audience. Posting to Facebook is fun, but very few places will see more traffic than images posted to Google Maps.

I have posted a few dozen 360 photo spheres to Google Maps, most have been viewed tens of thousands of times, a few have view counts of a hundreds of thousands of times. Given that I often use Maps to explore areas I intend to visit, or may never visit and just want to see, it seems proper to also contribute to this online resource.

The newer DJI drones like the Mavic Air produce 360 panoramas automatically. Stitched on-the-fly onboard the drone the panoramas are saved to the memory card ready for use at the end of the flight. The images are not without issues, the onboard stitching is quick and small flaws are usually visible. Far better results can be achieved by other stitching software in post, but the drone produced panoramas are generally good enough for web posting.

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Connecting the Community

This island is a small community, anything that happens is likely to involve someone you know, or a friend of theirs. There are often only a one to three degrees of separation between you and nearly every event that makes the local news.

Mauna Kea Wreck — A wrecked Toyota pickup truck about a mile below Hale Pohaku

Even someone who has not grown up here seems to become quickly enmeshed in the community… One day I hear news of a body being discovered on a remote Kohala coastline by kayakers. The next day at work I ask Peggi about her husband’s kayak trip… As you guessed, they found the body. This may seem unusual, but here these sort of linked events are commonplace, amplified by the small community effect.

It is amazing how fast information moves from mauka to makai, the grapevine is very well connected on this island. This connectedness is accelerated by social media. Where once you would have to wait hours or days for official confirmation, or a newspaper report, we now know immediately.

There are specific places everyone goes for this type of informations. Two notable Facebook groups cover island happenings, Big Island Thieves and Big Island Popo Alert.

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Link in Facebook Issues

I like to cross-post some of my blog postings to Facebook. Yes it serves to publicize and steer traffic to my blog. However, I am selective in the articles I cross-post, and I find that many of my Facebook friends and followers appreciate it. I get a lot of likes and shares with some types of posts.

There is also the issue of Facebook’s intellectual property policies, a bit of a rights grab, quite disturbing to a photographer like myself. Thus I do not generally post any of my better photos directly to Facebook. Snapshots? These are OK. Good photos? These I post to my own blog and then just link them on Facebook.

On occasion I find that Facebook does not cross-post properly, the usual issue is the lack of a thumbnail. For this I have found there is a developer’s tool on the Facebook site for evaluating links.

Facebook Link Debugger

Just paste the URL into the bar and check it out. Interestingly this tool seems tied to the main website servers. Try linking on your Facebook wall, when this fails go to the debugger and paste the link in. The image should appear in the information listed about the link. Then go back to your own page and re-post the link, it will now work and the image will be displayed properly. Surprisingly reliable.