The last weeks have been particularly busy at Dronestagr.am. Following the opening of the new video section, we have have implemented several new features that should make it more user friendly and more attractive for those who love beautiful photos, drones, and motionless travels.

Social features

In order to grow our community of “dronographs” (contraction of drones & photographs that I just made up), it was essential to provide more social functionalities. Starting with the most obvious, the new update add the following features:

Follow a user

Besides the possibility to follow a specific author via RSS feed (you can add this URL http://www.dronestagr.am/author/edupin/feed/ in an agregator if you want to follow me) it is now possible to follow an author using the new « Follow » button. You just have to visit the profile of the user you want to track, such as http://www.dronestagr.am/author/edupin/ and click the Follow button beside his nickname on the right. You can also request him to follow you. The user may accept or reject your invitation, and can also deny you the right to follow him.

follow

Three new tabs have appeared on your dashboard to help you manage your followers/following: Dashboard, I follow, Followers.

followers02

Be aware that you can now share directly on Facebook and Twitter from the page of a user.

Message box

It’s now possible for you to send a message to any registered members on Dronestagr.am. All the features of an internal messaging system are now available: send a message, reply to one, manage them, delete them, block a user, etc…

To access your message box, hover your username on the top right of the page and select Message Box in the drop-down menu.

messagerie

Both « Follow » and Message features are using a notifications system: a small envelope will appear on the top right of the page each time you receive a new request or message. You will also receive those notifications by email

Explore

Search by drone et camera type

The new features demanded us to spend a lot of time to organize and consolidate our database. In addition to the existing options of exploration by date, title, number of views, Likes and others, you can now search by drone and camera type. You can find them on the left of the page, inside the « Explore » tab. If you click on “By drone” for example, you get the list of the most 5 used drones, the DJI Phantom comes unsurprisingly first http://www.dronestagr.am/top-5-drones/.

explore

Once on this page, click on the name of a drone will show you all pictures made ​​with this device.

top5 drones

The same goes for cameras: http://www.dronestagr.am/top-5-cameras/. I’ll let you guess which one is the most in use… 🙂

View a map with all your pictures

It’s now also possible to display a map with all the pictures made by a particular user. Need an example? Got to a profile page like http://www.dronestagr.am/author/looka/

You will find the map of this user on the bottom of the right sidebar. Click on « VIEW ON MAP » to see it in fullscreen, where each icon refers to a shot.

author map

In a few days, this page will also host information like drones and camera type used by this user.

That’s it for the first avalanche of features in 2014. In a couple of week, a significant update will add an image editor on Dronestagr.am, including a very unique and nice option, which will definitely surprise you.

See you in a few days for this exciting news, but until then… sharpen your propeller (and lens).

All our best wishes of happiness for this new year!

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