PUPS done passed on

Last year, when I got my iPad Air 2, I finally developed a realistic workflow for posting here while on the move. Importantly for me, I found a way of doing this with my daily diary. The camera is good enough and I found a 10€ version of Photoshop called Photoshop Touch that had proper layers, proper tools including warping, and proper filters. The only problem with this was the fact that iOS will not allow you to export photos with anything except its own randomly generated file names. However, the scripts I have written for this site expect the diary photos to have file names in the form 2015-02-28.jpg or similar, so this wouldn’t do.

Then I found PUPS, a 1.99 app that uploaded photos to a WordPress site while allowing you to rename the image just before it was sent. It was an iPhone app but it worked and it made everything very simple. It was made by the makers of Blogsy and, as far as I could discover, it was unique.

On January 29, 2016, Lance from Fomola posted this on the Blogsy site:

We tried to come out with a new version of Blogsy (Blogsy II) which would work with the latest version of iOS. Unfortunately, due to the changes in iOS, Blogsy II would become sluggish and basically unusable after dragging in only a few media items (photos or vidoes).

Given the fact that the sales of Blogsy have been so low for quite some time, we would not be able to recoup our investment to rebuild Blogsy from the ground up in hopes that there could be a solution to this sluggishness.

Therefore we have removed Blogsy from the app store and there will be no new version. We have also removed PUPS from the App Store.

Fomola, the company behind Blogsy and PUPS, has been shut down.

Thank you to all of you that have helped along the way and all those that have sent emails of support, encouragement and praise. It was a great experience and memory.

This is one failure closer to success.

At this point, when I upgraded to iOS 9, PUPS started behaving slightly oddly. It still worked but it would not reappear from the background without freezing. Last week I upgraded to iOS 9.3 it stopped working altogether. It would open but it was unable to show any images and it crashed as soon as I tried to do anything.

I realised that PUPS had finally passed on, and so I looked for something else.

Eventually I found another app and a WordPress plugin that, together, achieved the same effect albeit in a slightly more clumsy way. I spent 1.99€ on BIRU-WP which will load single or multiple photos to a WordPress site. It works simply, efficiently and very accurately. It also lets me name the images with the date they were taken, but this name takes the format 2/28/15, which is a whole lot better than something like jky56ggy3dr33.jpg. It identifies the image by its date – but not in the format I need.

I then found Media File Renamer, a plugin for WordPress. This automatically renames all the different sized files, and changes all the links in the database, as soon as I change the name in the Media Library. So, once I have uploaded through BIRU-WP, I now open the Media library and manually change 2/28/15 to 2015-02-28, and the files all get renamed to 2015-02-28.jpg and so on.

Its one step more, and that extra step might be irritating when I am somewhere with little connectivity – but it is possible again.

What’s more…

I am waiting for the same thing to happen one day with Photoshop Touch.

Adobe abandoned it last year in favour of a suite of Phtoshop apps that try to force you into Adobe Cloud. They removed it from the App Store. As far as I can see, even taken together, the new apps do rather less than Touch, with a lot more steps. They use a different, far inferior, model in which the iPad is effectively reconceived as a thin client.

Boo, I say, as I confidently wait for iOS 10 to knock Photoshop Touch out of play, and Adobe to remain resolutely unconcerned.