Free App & First Winners
Yesterday version 1.2 of the iPhone app was released, so the app is now free. I’ll talk more about the new features in the app in a bit; first I want to talk about some amazing people. First, a big thank you to everyone who…
August Uploads and Solar Storms
Thanks to so many of you, yesterday was the second largest uploading day BillionGraves has ever seen (the biggest uploading day coincided with our first cemetery event). We saw photos from all over pour into the database, and we appreciate every one of them. One…
Earn a BillionGraves T-shirt
This month we want to give you a t-shirt. We’ll send a free BillionGraves t-shirt to anyone who collects and uploads 1,000 GPS-verified* photos before August 31 (anything uploaded from August 1 onward counts). Collecting 1,000 photos may sound a bit daunting, but it really isn’t….
Testers Needed for a New Feature
In the past, we on the BillionGraves team have gotten a lot of requests to allow photo uploads from devices that aren’t smartphones. We’ve always answered by saying that we want the information on BillionGraves to be as precise as possible, especially on details like…
Planning Local Events
You’ve probably already seen the results of the event we planned to map out part of a Utah cemetery; now try to create some similar results in your area. If you know enough BillionGravers in your area, let them all know a place and a…
Meeting Up for Cemetery Mapping
Our cemetery mapping trip celebrating Utah’s Pioneer Day was a definite success: American Fork Cemetery is now 2402 images richer. A small group of 15 BillionGraves contributors gathered in the cemetery and in an hour or so had recorded over a third of the grounds. Some people…
Save a Dollar—Buy the iPhone App Now
Very soon the BillionGraves iPhone app will be available free for download. I’ve discussed before our reasons for charging a nominal “entrance” fee, but we’ve decided that it’s more important to make the app as widely available as we can—we’ll do our best to filter…
Event: Holiday Weekend Cemetery Mapping
This Sunday in Utah (USA) is a holiday called Pioneer Day, when Utahns celebrate the pioneers who first trekked across America’s Great Plains and into the Rocky Mountains to settle the valleys of northern Utah. In case you weren’t already aware, the BillionGraves team is…
Cemetery News Feed
Now you can see all the BillionGraves activity from your dashboard. We’ve added an activity monitor and news feed to the BillionGraves website. Once you log in, you’ll see your dashboard, and in the window just below your profile picture is a set of scrolling…
Android Update: Add a Cemetery
The initial launch of the Android app featured a bare-bones essentials version: it could find your local cemeteries and it could collect photos, but it couldn’t add cemeteries to the database while mobile (though we add cemeteries manually for any BillionGraves user who notifies us of…
Deciphering Swedish Stones
You may have noticed that there are a lot of headstone photos being collected in Sweden. If you don’t understand Swedish, these photos may be too baffling to transcribe—and if you’re like me, you don’t like having to skip a photo just because of something…
Smartphones in the Summer Swelter
This weekend many of you went out and collected cemetery photos, and speedy transcribers have already made many of those photos searchable. (There are still about 2800 photos—go transcribe!) Some of the photo-collectors may have run into some of the hiccups we hit over one…