Yesterday I purchased a Samsung SPH-A900 mobile phone. My old phone was several years old, and the battery was starting to pop out. Also, all of the numbers, except for “8” were wearing off. It is a pretty nifty phone. It browses the web at usable speeds, has a pretty cool camera, and allows me to send photos to people. It can also display full-motion video.
As you can see from the previous post, I can now post photos directly to the web from my phone. (And other posts.) I would say that this means that I will post more, but that probably won’t be the case.
I like the ability to post photos directly to the web, but there are a couple of minor snags. I like to make sure that all of my web pages validate; one of the requirements is that all photos have “alt” tags. (These are the phrases that get displayed when you cannot view the image.) When you post a photo using the Blogger mobile software, images get included without an alt tag–even a blank alt tag. This means I have to go in later to add alt tags. However, I am not convinced that this is totally Blogger’s fault. It appears that there is no way to include a caption with the photo once it is sent from the phone. I can attach a caption to the photo after I take it with the camera, but that caption is not included with the image after it is sent through the Sprint servers.
The workaround is to go back and include “alt” tags after I send images and posts to the web. The quick-and-dirty fix would be for Blogger to include blank “alt” tags when they post images without a caption. The correct fix is for Sprint and Samsung to include captions with the images that Blogger extracts from the image and includes in the “alt” tag.
Also, I’m not thrilled that my images get stored on Blogger’s servers rather than being published to my web site.
But for now, I just love that I can post images on the web.
[Update: it turns out that blogger does upload the images to my server. That’s a good thing]