We are pleased to announce a major upgrade to ScrapWalls. Here are some of the new features:

Captions

Zoom in and hover over photos to see their captions.  Click on walls or photos for extended information such as location, date taken, and author.  After creating an account and uploading photos, everyone can now add captions from the new captions page, or using the “properites” button while editing a ScrapWall.

One-Click Navigation

Viewing ScrapWalls is now easier than ever with our one-click navigation. Just click anywhere in the view area and the window will pan to your current mouse location!

Auto-Placement

Short on time, but still want to make a collage? The new auto-place feature in the edit page will automatically arrange and resize all of your photos into a grid on your ScrapWall.

Privacy

Everyone has personal pictures. That is why we have added privacy controls to ScrapWalls. When creating a wall, you now have the following options:

Public – Share your wall with the world.

Personal – Share with all of your friends. This wall will not go on the site MetaWall, but will be shown if someone views your main wall (e.g. at http://www.scrapwalls.com/johndoe).

Private – Share with specific friends. Only those who you send a direct link (e.g. at http://www.scrapwalls.com/johndoe/myprivatewall) will see your ScrapWall. It will not be shown on your main wall or the site MetaWall

A Blog!

It looks like you have already figured this one out. Please leave us your feedback about the new features and others you would like to see in the future so we can keep on making ScrapWalls as awesome as possible!

Thanks for taking time to read and we hope you enjoy ScrapWalls Version 2!

Cheers,
Joe, Kevin, and Kyle

Welcome to the ScrapWalls blog! Here you will be able to find information about upcoming features, give us feedback, and get all of the latest ScrapWalls news. To get started, this post gives some background about Scrapwalls.

What is it?

ScrapWalls lets you build and share photo collages online. You can upload pictures, arrange them with our easy drag-and-drop edit interface, and then publish your wall for others to see. Unlike traditional photo sharing, creating a ScrapWall is fun, you should try it out!

Not a photographer? At ScrapWalls.com, you can peruse collages that have been created by others on the MetaWall. When someone makes a public ScrapWall, we look it over, and, if we like what we see (sorry spammers), add it to the MetaWall. The MetaWall is a large and ever-growing collage of collages. On it, you can quickly browse through thousands of images with our zooming interface, which makes it easy to quickly glance at a collage and view only the best photos.

Meet the Creators

Kevin, Joe, and Kyle are all graduates of the University of Michigan. They got started in ScrapWalls in fall of 2007 while they were living in Seattle. Here is some more about each of the creators:

Kevin Borders – Kevin is a Ph. D. student in computer science at the University of Michigan.

Outside of work, photography is one of his passions. Kevin got involved with ScrapWalls (in fact, created the first ScrapWall) while trying to make an original anniversary gift for his girlfriend. With about 1000 high-resoution photos, Kevin arranged them into an outline of him and Jennifer.

Joe Golden – Joe is an Economics PhD student at the University of Michigan. After completing undergrad at at the University of Michigan, Joe worked at Microsoft for two years. His first foray into innovative web development was hungryhungrycoeds.com, an online database of campus events with free food.

Kyle Mulka – Kyle started working at Amazon after he graduated from UM in 2007. Kyle has been involved with a number of other websites and projects, including mschedule.com and the gmap uploader. The gmap uploader creates map tiles out of an image, and it led to his involvement with ScrapWalls. As the story goes, Kevin came home from work one day (Kyle and Kevin were roommates) asked Kyle, “How BIG of an image can gmap uploader handle?” The answer ended up being about 8000 pixels square, but over the next few weeks Kyle and Kevin worked to create the first ScrapWall (pictured above), which came in at 50,400 x 38,000 pixels – a pretty big collage!