Sit back and take a deep breath. Your favourite online hobby just got a little more time-consuming.
What is it?
The initial problem I’m going to face when it comes to this new service is what to call it. It actually doesn’t have a name, that I can see.
It can be referred to as Flickr with a Map, Flickr photos on a Map, Flickr GeoTagging and Maps, Flickr Maps, Flickr GeoTagging… I’d certainly prefer one of the two latter options.
I’d say that the actual practice of GeoTagging and the action of viewing the GeoTagges photos on a map are, although clearly linked, quite separate.
Essentially, Flickr now has a in-house system to GeoTag photos and browse GeoTagged photos on a map.
How have they done it?
The map technology they’re using is, of course, Yahoo! Maps.
For GeoTagging Flickr has integrated the Yahoo! Map interface with the Organizr very, very well.
It’s drag and drop, and just about all the options you could need are in there right from the start. It’s a brilliant interface, perhaps a little slow at times, but very simple and extremely easy to use.
Pagination for the Map is also presented in a beautifully elegant way. When viewing photos on a set area of the map, you order which photos you want to see either by freshness or interestingness.
So, for example, when viewing photos of London by interestingness, page one will contain the most interesting photos that are GeoTagged for that location.
Going one further, Flickr have employed some reasonable clustering algorithms which group photos which are close in location to each other, and just presents a number in a pink circle.
This grouping method can be a little over-active and sometimes present the centre of a group of photos as being in an inappropriate place; I’d hope they will tone down the threshold for clustering.
What are the best bits?
It’s all a pretty excellent system, very well executed - especially for a first release.
GeoTagging is intuitive and easy. There is a decent search box built into the map which allows you to find places by name (instead of scrolling around to find them).
Flickr also presents a map for each user under his profile (we saw the link to this earlier on in the month), and also for each Group which is a pretty cool idea.
Ordering by Interestingness is such an advantage, too. Who has the coolest pics in Bristol, Brighton, Dublin, New York…? You can see very quickly. Are you going on holiday soon? Take a look at the coolest pics from the very area you’re visiting! Brilliant, really.
Integration with the Organizr is pretty hot, too. Want to GeoTag a set? Well, the Organizr acts like you’d hope and not expect, which is just heaven for me. It places the pictures along the bottom of the screen ready for individual dragging, rather than forcing you to GeoTag them all in the same place.
You can link to map views, and of course search by tag, etc.
On the page of GeoTagged images, a link appears to a map of the image and the location is also printed (e.g. “Bristol, UK”).
Flickr have also provided a clever GeoTag importer. Many Flickr photos are already using a GeoTag microformat which has been used to make third-party Flickr maps. Their import tool will internally GeoTag the images and remove the old GeoTags.
What are the problems?
The biggest and baddest problem is the map quality of Yahoo! Maps. In the UK and Ireland, it is RUBBISH. Really, really rubbish.
So rubbish, in fact, that you can’t reliably use the map as a reference because it will mislead you, possibly by around half a mile.
A-roads are the smallest objects featured on the map, and they are jagged and approximate. This isn’t good enough at all.
Maps in the UK and Ireland are also misaligned with actual lat/long co-ordinates, totally unlike the satellite view which can be rather good. Neither views approach Google’s quality, however.
However you are still able to GeoTag your photos with third-party tools (I’ll sniff the best out soon) and just import the GeoTags into the Flickr system with their own tool.
Other problems after this include over-active location grouping, a slow-ish UI and the fact that filtering by group doesn’t actually work.
So, other than the mapping detail, it’s great!!
What can happen now?
Fun, fun, FUUUN!! Mapping opens a whole new dimension of photo organisation, and begins to bridge the virtual image sharing service with reality.
I’m expecting to see some fun new services emerging soon, not to mention a Google Maps version once they release the API to the GeoTagging service.
Hopefully UK users will speak up and Yahoo! will be motivated to play catch-up with Google and their map quality.
See also:
For those who are interested in areas not well covered by Yahoo Maps, Panoramio can be an alternative.
In Panoramio you can locate your photos via drag and drop interface using Google Maps. You also can watch the photos in Google Earth through KML feed.
Eduardo
[It's sort of spam, but I'll allow it - Ed.]
Google is going to grow so big, that one of these days, they are going to have a life feed of EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE to EVERYBODY! THAT would be freaked out!
GO OSX
[...] (tags: flickr geotagging cool) Posted by delicious @ 7:21 PM on August 30, 2006 Permalink Make money fast Xoftspy Make money on ebay T-mac-5 Ways to make money fast make money at homeEarn money Andis Hair Clippers Coffee Table Found money Hair Clippers Making Money Online Mens Shavers Motorola pink razor Pink Razor Phone Razor Phone Transfer money overseas Wahl Hair Clippers Wintasks Detecting spyware Adware Alert [...]
Nice review Fintan.
I definately agree with you on the map detail but Flickr were nice enough to acknowledge the problem on their latest blog post so hopefully we’ll see improvements.
I’m already having quite a lot of fun exploring peoples’ photos via their map. You can sort of shoot around different regions and then new things pop-up. A nice change from the chronological order they’re normally in.
First time here on your site. I am delighted to find your wonderful website online. Would you please also visit my homepage?
Hi people! Great job! Please visit my homepage too:
Yo! Cool stuff! Thanks for being here. Visit my sites, please:
Hi everybody! Wanna see my cool pages? Please visit my homepage too:
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 http://www.locr.com.