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Geotagging
You all know what a fan of tagging I am. I think user generated metadata is a very important discovery mechanism. Last week Flickr announced the availability of geotags and I finally got around to geotagging my most recent Flickr photos this morning.
First of all, its simple to do. Flickr has this cool screencast which shows you how to do it. But once I figured out that you do it with the organize tab, I was golden. There's a great maps interface (Yahoo Maps) and you simply type in the location of where you took the photo, find the exact location, and then type in the tags of the photos you want to put there, then drag and drop. Flickr does the rest, geotags them on the fly, and you are done. This screenshot shows what it looks like.
Once your photos are geotagged, they become discoverable by location. Stewart Butterfield said that two days after its geotagging tool was released, more than two million photos location tags were added. In addition, Flickr has released a kit that allows software engineers to build their own applications that include Flickr's geotagging tools. I can see so many applications of this. It's really great.
Here is a map with the location of my tagged photos. Here's a map of all the public geotagged photos in Aspen, Colorado. I contributed a few of those.
Very Cool.
September 5, 2006 Venture Capital and Technology | Comments (4)
Comments
I agree that it is very cool.
However, as I noted in my mini-review, the Yahoo! Maps data is simply not good enough for mapping - pretty much anywhere, but definitely outside the US. Zooomr has had geotagging for ages, based on Google Maps, and the data is clearly better... unfortunately their interface isn't quite as nice as the Flickr one.
Posted by: andyp | Sep 5, 2006 7:23:31 AM
completely agree with andyp.
the yahoo maps outside are woeful.
(apparently improvements are in the pipeline) but in the meantime loads of developers have developed tools using the api.
as I said in the flickr forums:-
There is a great little bookmarklet which works off your Flickr page and adds the geotags to a google map (and a customizable link) can be found at :-
http://labs.sumaato.net/tools/flickr_geocode_bookmarklet/
to quote from the web page "....enables mapping, geocoding and geotagging directly in your Flickr photo page. It works with all common browsers without the need for any extension."
And now there's also built a viewer
http://loc.alize.us/#/geo:0,0,2,k/
In balance it's a great new feature and will prove more and more useful when the accuracy of online maps improve.
Posted by: Eoin | Sep 5, 2006 9:07:42 AM
For those of you who prefer Google Maps for mapping your photos our project, Panoramio, may be interesting for you. Btw, you can later watch the photos in Google Earth KML feed, a much better experience than web based maps.
Btw, here is the area around Aspen in Panoramio.
Eduardo
Posted by: Eduardo Manchon | Sep 7, 2006 7:50:50 PM
Speaking about "geotagging": do you know locr?
locr offers the ideal solution and makes geotagging exceptionally easy. locr uses GoogleMaps with detailed maps and high-resolution satellite images. To geotag your photos just enter address, let locr search, fine-tune the marker, accept position, and done! If you don't know the exact address simply use drag&drop to set the position.
For automatic geotagging you need a datalog GPS receiver in additon to your digital camera. The GPS receiver data and the digital camera data is then automatically linked together by the locr software. All information will be written into the EXIF header.
Use the "Show in Google Earth" button to view your photos in Google Earth.
With locr you can upload photos with GPS information in them without any further settings. In the standard view, locr shows the photo itself, plus the place it was taken. If you want to know more about the place where the photo was taken, just have at look at the Wikipedia articles which are also automatically assigned to the picture.
Have a look at www.locr.com.
Posted by: Tom | Apr 24, 2007 3:48:06 AM
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