I love this freakin' camera. Like I said tehy have them at newegg for $299

I just got this message from Nikon's Media relations at MWW Group .

My name is John and I'm with Nikon's media relations firm, MWW Group . I came across your S7c post and am curious to how you got the camera to post directly to your blog? I can be reached at ___@___.com . Looking forward to hearing from you.

My Response

Hey John,
I am delighted with my Nikon s7c camera. I purchased it expressly for the purpose of posting to my elmwoodstrip.org journal and to encourage other users of my journaling site to post more images on their journals. I hope that the wifi system on the phone encourages more of the users to buy the camera and post on their journal.

Elmwoodstrip.org is a non-profit community blogging site for Buffalo, NY that I started as my MFA thesis project in 2003. I am very interested in helping the users publish media without having to purchase/learn how to use middleware software such as photoshop, etc. This camera is especially great because no matter which quality mode they take the pictures in, they have the option to send them at lower (journal ready) resolution (TV mode?)

Before purchasing the camera I had assumed it would actually send the images to an email address as attachments. Elmwoodstrip.org is already equipped to accepted journal posts via email as a way to deal with posting media from more antiquated cell phones that cannot upload files via their web browser to the users journals. Unfortunately, many of the users cannot afford the expensive monthly service charges to use cell phones which can post to their journal via the internet. When I saw the camera could connect to any "free" wireless hotspot without a service contract, I realized that this could spell a revolution in blogging live media.

HOW IT WORKS -

When I sent the first email I was disappointed because I had to visit the nikon site directly to grab the images. I had hoped the images were included as file attachments in the email. Then I realized that nikon gallery page referenced by the URL in the email contains a reference to a zip file which houses all the media files.

Being a web programmer, I wrote a PHP script for the elwoodstrip.org server which does the following.

1. Waits for the emails to arrive.
2. When they arrive, it parses the text to get the URL to the Nikon gallery page contained in that email.

3. It then visits that URL and finds the hidden form fields which contains the information needed to access the zip file. I am not sure why the "download all" button URL itself does not contain the information to access the file. This would make the process so much simpler and I don't see how putting it in a hidden form makes it any more secure. It appears that when you click "download all" the page uses javascript to submit the hidden form via POST which then presents the user with the zip file data.

4. To simulate this I store the hidden form field values and then simulate hitting the download all button by sending POST content to the nikon page that the form ACTION URL.

5. My server reads the binary zip data from the nikon server and saves the zip file to a temporary directory.

6. the server grabs the camera ID and the senders email from the nikon email.

6. The server then unzips the file. It matches the camera ID up with the user profile on elmwoodstrip.org. The users with this camera have to enter in their camera ID to make this happen.

7. The media files are then moved from the temporary cache folder to the appropriate user's journal media directory.

9. A journal is written by the server for that user including all media attached. The user then can login and edit from their desktop or mobile phone and add extra text.

QUESTIONS:
1. it would be nice to be able to type out a message to be sent with the email on the camera. You could easily type using the dial, in the same way you type out the email addresses. It can be awkward to send someone images without any textual content. For the journals it would make it that much greater.

1. Can there please be an additional link to the zip file in the email that comes to the user when they send the media. That woudl make this whole process so much simpler.

2. Is there some sort of API to allow users to have the media post directly to another server besides Nikon? I am just afraid to encourage many people to buy the camera only to find that nikon gets rid of their gallery site at some point and the cameras then no longer do wifi?

4. I think you guys are really missing out by not capitalizing on this. I would be happy to work with you for developing APIs to post on the major blogging sites directly from the camera. I think you could sell an exponentially greater number of cameras if people knew this could be done. In fact it would be even greater if you could put the address to post the data to into your camera. That way it could work with any system.

5. How did you find out about my journal. Was it all the hits to the nikon server while I figuring this out last night? ;)

If you have any questions feel free to email me.

Thanks for your time,
Paul Visco
Developer - elwmoodstrip.org - Buffalo, NY's Original Journal Community
System's Analyst - Roswell Park Cancer Institute