New features - May 8th, 2006
Google updated their Maps API to v2 not too long ago, so we thought it was time to polish and enhance our own offering. Lucky you! 
- “Around the World” on the browse page shows a mini-map with the most recent 150 geotagged photos uploaded to SmugMug.
- A similar “Around the World” box is now available on your own homepage to showcase your own photos. It won’t show up fpr your visitors unless you enter your own (free!) Google Maps API key. And of course, you can “remove from homepage” just like all the other boxes. Here’s how to add your own photos.
- SmugMaps got a style & speed overhaul.
- We now use the Google Maps v2 API, which loads faster, leaks less memory, and has extra zoom levels in big cities areas. Best of all, we now have satellite data for places like Europe!
- Much better location searching (thanks to our friends at Yahoo! for a great geocode interface!), including foreign cities and countries. (Yes, that does make this a SmugMug+Google+Yahoo mashup. )
- We’ve tied in our robust search engine so you can now find all photos matching a given set of search terms, and see them laid out on the map (if they’ve been geotagged). Pretty sweet.
- You can also search for photos “near” a given location, and even modify that search with keywords or search terms.
- We AJAXed the loading of the markers so it doesn’t hang your browser quite as much. Google Maps is a CPU hog.
- Two new Themes - The Graduate and Black Arts
- On a little more boring of a note to you non-geeks out there, we overhauled our storage architecture to improve performance and increase reliability. We have some news about a new storage partner that we’ve alluded to a few times, hopefully we’ll let everyone know the details soon.
