At 17:14h the Catalan National Assembly’s special website for the massive 250-mile long, 107,000 photograph strong Gigaphoto was inaugurated. In its first minutes, it is struggling under the huge load of visitors.
The Catalan National Assembly has opened the Catalan Way Gigaphoto site. You can see the 250-mile long Gigaphoto, stitched together from 107,000 individual photographs, at gigafoto.assemblea.cat. The site is groaning under the weight of so many visitors, but it is slowly becoming accessible. The hundreds and hundreds of thousands of participants have been waiting for this big day for a long time, since last September 11th when they held hands from one end of Catalonia to the other in support of independence, a distance of some 250 miles. If the gigaphoto’s publication has been delayed it’s because of the huge number of photos and the huge quantity of data involved. Today we will find out the details, but the Gigaphoto coordinator, Galdric Penyarroja, gave VilaWeb some hints about the project’s difficulties.
Wall Street Journal Photo of the Year 2013
“The ANC’s AV team was in charge of filming and photographing the September 11th demonstration in 2012 in order to share the photographs later,” explained Penyarroja. “For the Catalan Way, we studied the best way to do it and we saw that more than the number of volunteers, the challenge was to make sure they were well distributed. To avoid having crowds in zones that might have the highest media interest and that people went to those spots to take photographs, the ANC decided that there would be photo coverage of every segment. And that’s how the idea of the Gigaphoto was born.”
Eight hundred photographers and eight hundred assistants were distributed along the whole Catalan Way, usually one for each segment of the human chain, although in some segments, they needed two.
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