Alternative Facts?
It was meant to be a joke for #DS106 daily create #tdc2007, “Invent your own imaginary dataset.”-not so fictitious afterall. Using Google’s new Trends Visualization Tool was not as easy-peasy as it looked. What was supposed to be 10 minutes turned into 120 minutes.
Had I stayed with the original option of “%” - no problem. But try and create a data set with the “+” option, and you get this annoying “ ” hanging out with the left side visualization. I tried all sorts variations to get it to work; even opening the GIF in Photoshop and removing the offending layers. I wasn’t attentive enough to what I was doing, and my intended “clean” GIF turned out to be a little too clean, with blank frames that meant I would have to go back in and manually select the good layers again (some 400 of them). Nope- decided against that. Finally I gave up and decided to write this post about it instead of making it perfect.
Then came the low res vs. high res option for downloading the GIF. I could again take it into Photoshop and resize the high res version, or I could take another 5 minutes to download the low res as well. I opted to download again... but that ended up taking longer than needed too.
From Google:
Pro-tip #1: the high resolution download takes longer but it’s better quality for social sharing.
Pro-tip #2: Leave the window open on your desktop while it’s creating the gifs as it will do so quicker.
I thought I would save time by writing this post while it was downloading. (Didn’t believe the pro-tips yet.) Sure enough, it was painfully slow.
WHAT?! I attach the new HiRes version and now it works????? I give up. Time to go dancing. :-)
