Contribute Photographs

Anyone can contribute to this project. The only requirement is that all photos, videos and audio must be recorded on a street named Main.

We are using Flickr to gather all photographs for the project.

These are some simple instructions to get started...

1) If you don't have one already, create a new account at Flickr (it's quick and free)

2) Join the Mapping Main Street group

3) Upload your photographs of a specific Main Street

4) Tag Your Photos

This step is really important. If you don't tag your photos properly, we will not be able to display them on our site. If your city is more than one word (e.g. White Sulphur Springs) make sure you enter it with quotations marks as a tag (e.g. "White Sulphur Springs"). These are the tags you need to include:

name of place where you took the photo
(e.g. chattanooga).

abbrevitation of state where you took the photo (e.g. tn)

any words you feel describe the image or videos (e.g. people, ruin, sign, etc.). These tags will allow your photos to become a part of routes on our site.

mappingmainstreet

Contribute Videos

We are using Vimeo to gather all photographs for the project.

These are some simple instructions to get started...

1) If you don't have one already, create a new account at Vimeo (it's quick and free)

2) Join the Mapping Main Street group

3) Upload your photographs of a specific Main Street

4) Tag Your Videos

This step is really important. If you don't tag your videos properly, we will not be able to display them on our site. These are the tags you need to include:

name of place where you took the video
(e.g. chattanooga).

abbrevitation of state where you took the photo (e.g. tn)

any words you feel describe the video (e.g. people, ruin, sign, etc.). These tags will allow your photos to become a part of routes on our site.

mappingmainstreet

Contribute Audio Stories

We've decided to also use Vimeo as the means for people to upload audio stories. What this means is that you can make a very simple video (even just one image) and have the audio play out the whole time underneath it.

You can see this is what we've done with a few of the songs for the project. This ensures that audio playback blends into the site smoothly within the slideshows and since the media is then on Vimeo, it's easy to share with others and we can also feature it on our blog.

Depending on your production preferences, we've found a really easy, quick way to produce these types of "audio videos" is to use iPhoto. First, create a slideshow with just one image. Then choose the music to be the audio piece you've created. And then in the settings, check "Fit Slideshow to Music" and uncheck the Ken Burns effect. When you export the slideshow as a QuickTime movie, it makes a nice 640x480 .mov. Of course, there are other ways to make videos like this, but we've found this to be one simple approach.