New major changes

Hi all!,

Yes, we are still here and we want to make some changes, so the site will have some problems loading for a few days.

Basically the changes will affect to the paintmap engine (not visible for users). The most important additions will be:

- A new service to work with thumbnails (thanks http://www.thumbr.it, a great project!). The security, speed and customization of images will be much better.

- Upgrade the Google Maps Javascript App to  v3.


Thanks for your patience and support.

We're back!

Sorry for the delay in getting something up here. We have been very busy moving our servers to a new provider.

However, We are now focused on restoring the service, as you can see some things have changed: 

Unfortunately, the forum should be disabled for now. Thinking about the sustainability of the site we will choose to keep the service as simple as possible to fulfill its function.

These first few days we will work to stabilize Paintmap, for now you should be able to access, register or submit new paintings without any problems.

There have also been some important fixes, such as password recovery system or the ability to change your password from your profile.

Finally we are working on the idea of ​​cleaning the list of inactive users due to the high number of spammers who used the registry system of the old forum.

 As always, you can follow the Paintmap news in this blog and our facebook page.

 Thanks for your patience.

Painting the International Year of Forests:

“The history of human existence and civilizations is intertwined with forests and trees. Forests are crucial for the goods and services they provide, which people all over the world depend on. Strategies to enhance the contributions of the world’s forests to social development, livelihoods and poverty eradication are vital at a time when unsustainable practices and economic crises continue to threaten healthy forests and the people who depend upon them.” (U.N., I.Y.F.).


This is an update of our Paintmap Forum Project "Painting Forests for the People", presented as a contribution to the activities in the framework of the United Nations "International Year of Forests" (www.un.org/forests).

Paintmap contains many paintings about forests and tress and we would like to create a gallery to collect your paintings about different kinds of forests (deciduous or evergreen, tropical or dry forests, etc) as well as those trees that have some special meaning (aesthetic, natural or emotional value) for you the painter.

Why don't you spend a few minutes sending your "green" paintings to the "Art and Nature" Paintmap Forum?

Our Technical Team has made the process even easier than before for those of you who have your paintings previously loaded in Paintmap:

1. Enter Paintmap and go to “Your paintings”
2. Go to your selected painting and click on "Send to the forum"
3. Select the forum “Art and Nature projects”

At this moment our goal is simply to develop the Gallery with some basic "rooms" or categories. Depending on the success of the initiative we would make new proposals about the organization of the Gallery as well as how to proceed to send the project results to the United Nations Forum on Forests before the end of the IYF.

Thank you in advance for your interest and participation!
Jaime

Note: you can visit the seeds of the gallery at:
http://forum.paintmap.com/index.php?topic=76.0

IMPORTANT!: Sending your old Paintmap paintings to the Forum

You have probably heard about our Paintmap project “Painting forests for the people” launched to celebrate the U.N. International Year of Forests.

In our previous post we explained how to send your new paintings to the forum at the same time than uploading them in the Paintmap site. But let suppose that you want to send one of your previously uploaded paintings (for example, you are interested in participating in our extremely interesting "Art and Nature" forest project). How to do it?

The process will take you a few minutes only:

1. Enter Paintmap and go to “Your paintings”
2. Go to your selected painting and click on “Edit”
3. Go to the bottom of the page, check the box Post this painting in the forum? and select (in this example) the forum “Art and Nature projects”

Hoping to have your participation in the Paintmap Forum,

Jaime Rodríguez

Connecting Paintmap and the Forum

As our friend PhilIrish suggests, we have to work to give you an integrated experience between the new Forum and Paintmap.

In order to move in this direction, now you can post your new paintings directly form Paintmap to the forum. This is the checkbox you will find in the new upload form.

In addition you will be able to choose the board that suit your painting.

At the other side we are making your map more accesible from the community. All your posts will show your last map linked to your Paintmap Profile.

We hope these first features and the unique login system help you to enjoy both faces of paintmap.

The new Paintmap Forum!

We are so excited to present the new Paintmap Forum.

All of you, both newcomers and old Paintmap members, are invited to join this forum to share your ideas, comments and projects about not only the artistic or technical side of the paintings but also about the environmental, geographical or historical significance of the painted subject. Paintmap is the opportune place for environmentally concerned artists and people in general, so you should feel free to introduce any topic that could help to use art as a tool in nature and heritage conservation.

The Forum is being launched with a few topics covering the artist’s way of doing (plein air, studio, using reference images or Google geopositioned photography). A Paintmap unique character is the possibility of channeling your environmental and artistic proposals to the community through our forum “Art and Nature Projects”. You can also go directly to the forum “Our endangered environment” to present those works of immediate relevance for the conservation or protection of a landscape, a historic landmark or something of special value to you. Of course, you will have the possibility of posting stuff that was not allowed in the Paintmap site: reference images, work in progress, demos, close-up images of your paintings, etc: the forum “Paintmap complementary stuff” will be the right place. Without forgetting some general interest places to introduce yourself or to comment about any idea you have in mind...

As a visitor you are free to browse posts but you might be interested in posting your own comments, paintings or projects...If this is so, why not creating your account? It is free of charge and you will become part of a community of people linking art and environment.

Link | http://forum.paintmap.com/

More about Cool Places in Paintmap

Ideally a Cool Place should be a “hot spot” of paintings and painters aggregation resulting from the popularity of the site. It may be a monument, a city, a forest, a protected landscape, a river or a whole country, etc, it depends on paintings subjects and spatial distribution. Also ideally a CP should be as concrete as possible: better a city than a country, better a forest than a state, etc.

Because of the size of the Paintmap community, most of the proposed CPs at this moment are due to the activity of one or a few painters, but this is not a problem to establish a CP.

The goal should be to fill the left part of the Paintmap screen (sixteen paintings) to define a CP, as in this example of the Highlands, Scotland



However we have also proposed CPs with a lower number of paintings just as a sort of attractor encouraging people to consolidate these artistic hot spots, as it is the recent case of Montreal, Canada:





Ideally, the CPs gallery would evolve towards a progressively smaller and separate spots but it is possible to find coexisting CPs at different scales. “Holland”, “Arnhem (Holland)” and “Utrecht (Holland)” are an example of this possibility:










So, there are many reasons and possibilities to propose a Cool Place as well as to propose a change of their present scale or its geographical identification.

Local painters should be the protagonists of this activity, up to this moment mostly carried out by us, the Paintmap Team.

Hoping to have your inputs!

New in Paintmap: fantastic close-up painting scanning

Wouldn’t like to come close to a painting and see the artist’s brush (or knife, pastel, pencil, etc) stroking? To me this is one of the most useful ways to learn about the artist’s style and now Paintmap offers such an interesting possibility. Look at these examples to appreciate the usefulness of the Paintmap close-up tool:

http://www.paintmap.com/?item=1224
http://www.paintmap.com/?item=1071
http://www.paintmap.com/?item=429
http://www.paintmap.com/?item=2677
http://www.paintmap.com/?item=528

However, to obtain the maximum benefit from this new tool images should be uploaded as close as to the maximum size allowed (5 Mb jpg). Unfortunately, many of the paintings already uploaded are small in size and the close up tool doesn’t help too much.

Thus, we would encourage the Paintmap community to upload from now their pictures at the largest size possible. Uploading will take a bit more time but advantages will surely compensate for this minor inconvenient.

In any case, our close to 2500 painting collection includes a large amount of works that can be close-up explored, so enjoy them!

Help us translate Paintmap into your native language!

We’re finally launching our translation project and we’re looking for volunteers from our growing community of users to help.

The translation process is simple, easy and fast!. Paintmap highly appreciate your contribution and you'll be mentioned on the Paintmap team page.

New languages

1.- Download the translation file. http://www.paintmap.com/lang/en.po (Right-Click and Save Target As).
2.- To open translation files .po you need an editor, you can use, for instance Poedit. Download Poedit and install it in your computer.
3.- Translate the file. Write the translation in the down-left window and save it.

Finally send it to contact@paintmap.com.

Existing language

You can update one of the existing languages with Poedit:

- Spanish: http://www.paintmap.com/lang/es.po


Some notes

- Full document is "only" 153 strings.

- If you already sent a translation file, wait until your translation is online to download the translation file again.

- Translations status for each sentence is indicated by color in Poedit:

Blue means not translated
White means translated
Yellow means "fuzzy" translation.

- Fuzzy means that there is a translation for that entry or the system tried to figure out one, but you need to check it manually before is used. Once you correct it it changes to white color (translated). In some cases the fuzzy translation is completely Ok and doesn't need to be changed, then just click on the "rain" icon in the toolbar and it will change to white (translated).

Two thousand paintings and a new design on Paintmap.com

Paintmap this week has reached two thousand paintings, with more than 300 artists collaborating. To celebrate, we have updated our web design.

With fewer elements and a clearer interface, we hope to have a site that makes it easier to explore and navigate the painted world.

Thank you, all of our users and artists, for your support!

Http://www.paintmap.com