Searching the Site

We’ve always been very appreciative of the help we get from volunteers. Our recent call out for help on the Community Blog and marketing has had a tremendous response and we’ll be getting in touch with people that have expressed an interest shortly.

Equally our previous call for assistance in Autumn 2022 has provided additional help on various areas of our work behind the scenes, including social media, marketing, the helpdesk and moderation.   And we'd also like to acknowledge and thank those members who independently organise the weekly/daily challenges, which are so much part of the fun of the site.

With this additional support it has led to discussions behind the scenes about many differing subjects relating to how Blipfoto works, so we thought it would be an ideal opportunity to have a short series of Blip Central posts to remind or inform members.

We want to start with how to find things on Blipfoto. Hopefully most of you will know everything you need to post your image from the day, but maybe we can enlighten you on some of the things you might not have known or forgotten during your time here.

How to find Help

A simple one to begin with and probably the easiest.  If you have a problem help can be accessed from the link in the footer bar used throughout the site. Just scroll to the bottom of any page to find it. Clicking on "Help" will give you three further options. ….

Got a Question (our FAQs)

Getting Started

Still can’t find an answer

We encourage you to check out the FAQs and getting started guide first, most common answers to problems are there.  If that fails, you can contact us using the ‘Still can’t find an answer’ form.  This will send a message to our helpdesk and you should get an automatic response via email.  Sometimes your mail provider might think our email is junk, so always check your spam folder for an answer. Alternatively, you can check progress via My Activities on the Help pages.  

Please remember that we need as much information as possible if you do find the need to contact the help desk.  Getting a query like 'I can’t upload my image’ with no additional details is not going to make it easy to help you.

If you think there are any FAQs missing, please let us know.  We appreciate that there may be some information that needs to be updated or added.

Searching the Site

Finding a blip, or series of blips can be made easier by using tags.  Many members will already be familiar with the use of tags for the daily and weekly challenges.  Simply put words that describe the post into the tags field, separated by a comma.  When you want to search for a tag of, for example ‘rain’ you use the search field (next to your username in the top black bar of the page) and type in ‘tagged rain’ or ‘#rain’. 

Just a reminder that if you just use a word to search, without adding ‘tagged’ or ‘#’ before the word, it will search the title and text in the post s as well.

To search for a particular person (e.g.joeblogs), you can similarly use ‘by joeblogs’ or ‘@joeblogs’.

If you want to search only within your own journal you can use ‘by me’ or ‘@me’.  Just a caution that you need to use a lowercase ‘m’ as there is a journal with that same username.

Were you aware that you can also use date search strings?  Simply use a date in this order ‘DD/MM/YYYY’ to limit images to a particular day.  If you want to search within a range of days you can do so by using the following syntax ‘ DD/MM/YYYY to DD/MM/YYYY’.

The beauty of t the search tool is you can combine these different search terms, e.g. @me #flowers 01/07/2024 to 05/08/2024.

Using Maps

Often overlooked, and we appreciate that little development has taken place on this area of the page since it was part of the major site upgrade in 2014.  If you geotag your images, using the icon in the entry page, you can subsequently check for other images in the same area.  Alternatively, you can open maps and either zoom in to a location or search for a place.  The number of posts is currently limited to the last 10 within the search area. It’s a great way to see if there are any other members posting images near you.

Tips and Tricks

We’re sure that there are other tips and tricks you may use on the site.  if you do, why not let us know in the comments below? We’re sure other members will be very appreciative.

As an example, we’ve had this from tractorfactoryphotos:

you can also link directly to [or view a photo from a specific date] a post using..
www.blipfoto.com/<username>-yyyy-mm-dd
eg... my first non-backdated blip is at...
www.blipfoto.com/tractorfactoryphotos-2006-07-21