Atpic is a free photo and video sharing site. It offers a customizable solution to share digital photos and videos with friends and family using the World Wide Web.

Uploading of photos and videos

Uploading photos and videos can be made using HTTP and FTP. FTP can be used to upload batches of documents to a so called 'FTP-zone'. Documents can be public, in which case they can be viewed by any web surfer or they can be made private, in which case a secret key needs to be known to view the document.

Video features

Videos frames are extracted automatically. Atpic supports MPEG, WMV, AVI and QuickTime MOV file formats. The maximum file size allowed is currently 100Mb which is the size of the FTP zone. This limit may be increased by contacting Atpic support.

Image features

Atpic offers some image manipulation features like image rotation and automatic thumbnail creation. Atpic supports JPEG, GIF and PNG file formats. Exif data stored in JPEG files created by digital camera is also supported by Atpic.

Customization

Atpic accounts are configurable. The HTML code of each page can be controlled using a special template language. To each Atpic variable corresponds a dynamical HTML block. The generation of complex HTML code canthereforebe made available to non HTML expert in a very easy and intuitive way. The style can then be further adapted to users needs using the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) standard proposed by the W3C. Atpic provides support for true Cascading of CSS sheets: more than one style sheet can be associated to a page and their order can be easily modified. The style sheet and templates can be coupled into Atpic skins. Once reviewed, Atpic Templates, Styles Sheets and Skins can be shared with all the Atpic user base. Each time a change is made to a style, Atpic Web Thumbnailer creates automatically snapshots of a sample web page using the style to make the choice of style easier.

Technology used

Atpic uses the wiki technology to manage international versions of the interface. It uses open source software mainly Apache for file serving and Postgresql as a relational database back-end. The storage infrastructure is based on a Linux storage cluster. Only stable and well known Internet standards are used like XHTML, CSS2, FTP and RSS. Some features aimed at the ease of use, like automatic previews of the style used, use Javascript and AJAX technologies.

Photos classification

Photos can be grouped into a directory-like structure using galleries to build a Taxonomy. Atpic also propose a Folksonomy where documents can be described with tags. As any registrered user can tag document with his own words, Atpic is a good example of broad folksonomy. Atpic introduces also a mechanism coupling taxonomy and folksonomy where tags associated to galleries and artists are cascadated to the galleries and artist's pictures. Broad taxonomies have many interesting properties like the power law.

Documents can also be geotagged. On the contrary to the keyword tagging described above, only the owner of the document can geotag a document. Atpic maps relies on two maps API: Google maps API and Yahoo! maps API. Data layer and presentation layer are clearly separated: The map is created using the AJAX version of the APIs. The javascript code calls a GeoRSS feed (data) that can be called independently using the Atpic API where parameters like the longitude and latitude of the corners of a rectangle on the earth to zoom into can be passed in an HTTP GET call.

History

Atpic was created in 2003 by Alex Madon as a toy to experiment with various open source technologies.