[OpenLayers-Users] Clusters and dynamic layers

[James Morley]

Hi

I've been having a play with OpenLayers today and thoroughly enjoying it.
I'm not a skilled coder, but can usually hack things together.

I have made good progress but am having problems with the following, and
wondered if anyone could give any guidance?

- clustering placemarks - styling the cluster markers and setting their
behaviour to either list all images or to zoom in to that location
- adding a 'loading' image each time the Flickr API is being called (it can
be quite slow)

A bit of background and where I'm up to ...

A while ago I developed a dynamic kml service and a Layar-based Augmented
Reality mobile app for Flickr Commons images, using the Flickr API. If
you're not familiar with Flickr Commons, it's where a large number of major
cultural sector organisations share collections of historic images -
currently well over 200,000 images, with around 26,000 geotagged.  More on
where I got to here -
http://www.whatsthatpicture.com/2011/12/mapping-flickr-commons

As you'll see, I also started to put together a straight Google Maps API
version - see http://www.whatsthatpicture.com/flickr/commons-map.php - but
ran into some issues and abandoned it, hence why I'm now looking at
OpenLayers.

I have got the basic map functionality set up by pulling bits of various
online examples, most notably the example for dynamically loading Flickr
data using the BBOX - see
http://www.whatsthatpicture.com/flickr/commons-osmtest-v3.htm but what I
would like to do is load more placemarks but have them cluster. When I
tried to do this the clustering works but the bahviour is then wrong, even
when zoomed in to single placemarks -
http://www.whatsthatpicture.com/flickr/commons-osmtest-v3.htm .  I've also
been looking at the AnimatedCluster method described at
http://acuriousanimal.com/code/animatedCluster/ as I like the visual
appearance of this. But in either case, what I'd really like is
for the behaviour to be that it zooms in, or displays a list
of aggregated images.

Finally, as mentioned above, because the API responses can be slow (and I
want to pull in more items which will only make this worse) I want to have
a loading image display until the layar has finished loading. Is this the
sort of thing that
http://trac.osgeo.org/openlayers/wiki/Addins/LoadingPanel would deal with?

Sorry for the long email from a noob!

Thanks, James

-- 
---
James Morley
www.jamesmorley.net / @jamesinealing
www.whatsthatpicture.com / @PhotosOfThePast
www.apennypermile.com
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