Oh the weather outside is frightful....

Not really, but I thought that would make a catchy title for this entry.  Sometime yesterday, read through the Flicker Blog post I get on a fairly regular basis and discovered a new group on Flicker called the Project Weather.  It looked kind of interesting, so I checked it out and decided to join the group.  After all, what's cooler than a bunch of really cool shots of different kinds of weather right?

If you've clicked on the link already, you'll see that Project Weather is run by Yahoo.  Photos that appear in this group will also appear in the Yahoo Weather app for iPhones and iPads.  In other words, if a photo is accepted, it gets put into the queue.  When using the app, a person checking out the weather for an area should get a photo that corresponds to the area and to the weather of that area at the time.  

I'm not sure if this works all that well as it's nighttime right now and the only shots I'm seeing on the app at the moment are star photos or full moon shots.  I checked out a couple of the photos and one of the photos used for my area was a photo taken in Brazil, but the photo matched up with the weather for my area, so it worked.

So after checking this out, I decided to submit a couple of my shots to the project in the hopes that possibly one might make it onto the app.  The project's site says that I could wait up to a month before seeing any of my shots in the photostream, so I wasn't expecting anything.  I uploaded about a dozen shots or so and didn't even think about it afterwards.

This afternoon, when I got home from work, I logged onto the computer and noticed that the shot of Bryce Canyon above had been favorited by someone.  I found this a little odd since this particular shot has been buried in my photostream, so it gets very few views now.  But I decided to click on the shot, just to see and I saw that it was now in the Project Weather photostream.  It had been less than 24 hours and one of my shots had been included in the app.  Not only that, when I looked more closely, half of the shots I'd submitted were now in the photostream, including this other one I took at Crescent City, California a couple of years ago.

So now, I have the Yahoo Weather app (free by the way) on my iPad and I have the current locations of the places where my shots were taken on there just to see if they ever show up in the rotation.  I guess it's a good way to get some new exposure for some of my shots.  Here's a link to the other shots that Project Weather accepted from my submissions.  Hopefully, the next time it snows up in the high desert, someone using the app will see my shot of Joshua Trees with snow on them.