Slashdot Mirror
Inside Microsoft's New Digital Photo Project
robyn217 writes "While Microsoft Research plays 'Big Brother' to a young hiker's trip across North America, it breaks new ground in digital photography by combining metadata, like location via GPS, with the image. Its online presence looks impressive as it displays digital photo albums on a map of the world, but it's slow and unwieldy for the most part and may not be better than a standard travelogue site. This week, I took a closer look at the project currently named the World-Wide Media eXchange (WWMX)."
I currently run a website, TrailRegistry that does exactly this. Actually it does a whole lot more. The general tilt of my site is hiking related, so the pictures are generally of views, shelters, mountains, etc... What I think is more important is sharing of trip data collected by GPS. So for instance, if you hiked an unmarked trail in your area, you could upload the GPS track log to TrailRegistry, and TrailRegistry will create a Topo map (On the fly) for other users to use.
Please check it out, You might find it usefull. Also,I allways love feedback on what I could do better..
Check out TrailRegistry.com, my hiking site, Maps, altitude pr
... but I just can't resist plugging hostip.info which attempts to geolocate IP addresses to a latitude / longitude map (and give a nice zoom-in if you're located or (if you're unknown) once you have put in your details...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Just don't take any photos/GPS of $cientology near Riverside California. That's an "interfering with a religion" crime according to the kangaroo court there. (And leave the Tom Cruise missles at home.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
National Geographic has been doing a dismal job over the past few months, and there really are not enough players in the game. It's funny, in my experience most geeks really do like the great outdoors, so it seems a proper marriage to me!
I'm one of those outdoor geeks (backpacking, kayaking), and I have to disagree with your assesment of National Geographic's performace. I'm not certain exactly to what you are referring, but if it's basic mapping software, I *love* their NatGeo Topo State series. The maps are the latest USGS topoquads (many other campanies' prducts, like Delorme, use maps that are many years old and lacking in many newer trails), and are beautifully reproduced. GPS support has been wonderful, and I can do exactly what the above blurb was talking about - take photos, record their positions in my GPS, and, when I get back home, upload my route, along with waypoints indicating, among other things, where I took what photos. The photos then have to be manually associated with each waypoint, but it works so well, I'm not about to start complaining.
Yet the site isn't actually working. Maybe it does suck, maybe it's nothing new, but since it's not actually accessible at the moment, isn't it kind of hard to tell?
It's a Microsoft Research site and obviously they weren't expecting it to be get much traffic. If you doubt Microsoft can set up a site that can handle high volume, everybody click this now:
Microsoft.com
And of course no website running on say, Apache, has ever been slashdotted.
Sheesh.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Screw M$. If you have a GPS and a digital camera, you can make your own site using GPS Photo Link.gpsphotolink I've used it on numerous ocassions and it works like a charm. It uses the time stamp on your digital photos to relate to the nearest waypoint or position in your GPS tracklog to generate GIS data for your photo points. It then creates HTML that links your photos to map graphics of your location.
Check out the sample sites at SAMPLES
If you're talking about GeoTIFF, it's not the same thing. GeoTIFF adds real georeferencing metadata to raster data. This just adds coordinates to a photo. I think the point of this is to then present the photos in a geographical context. They hint that it'll be a feature of Longhorn's media-management capabilities.
Cute idea. Still, it's not all that revolutionary. If Apple added a geo-coordinate metadata field and simple mapping capability to iPhoto, they could probably beat MS to the punch well before Longhorn ships. But I don't know why they would.
Like much of the MS research stuff I've seen, it's a neat idea but what's the point? Solution, where's your problem? Might be a nice addition to ophoto.com or something but nobody is screaming for it that I can tell.
Take a deep breath and relax - what makes you assume that the "Big Brother" is an Orwellian reference, vs. a reference to the idiotic reality-tv show of the same name (thus the capitalization, perhaps)? RTFA and decide for yourself if this doesn't ring true.
o 1 Sig beneath your current threshold
Good news!
It's already there and been available for years. Well, in Japan anyway.
I wrote an open source EXIF metadata library for Delphi. Sometime in summer 2001, I had someone from Japan write and inquire about adding the GPS EXIF tags. I did so and tested it with some sample photos that were sent along. The interesting thing is that evidentally software shipped with the camera that plotted your path on a map and put links to each photo that you took. Of additional interest is that the GPS tags include an entry for "direction" that GPS normally doesn't return (that is: "Which direction is the camera pointing?"). So I don't know if the camera also had an embedded compass or not.
Lets see (sound of shuffling back throug old files...) that was a Kashmir model KASHMI.
Cheers!
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
Here's "your" idea " http://www.geospatialexperts.com/
USGS DOQs (the kind used on Terraserver & the probably best a civilian will get) are 1m resolution aerial photos. You're not really going to be able to "zoom in" on photos taken from the ground. There probably are satellites with better resolution but you're not likely to see the images made publicly available for a long time.
You can do this today! Go to the library and ask for an "atlas." Also, look in the photography section for whole books of photos of different places.
Yes, I suppose it is at that.
Wait a minute. "Breaking new ground by... combining metadata with an image"????
Sigh. Astronomers have been doing this since at least 1981 with the FITS Format. See over here for the full story on this venerable and still very much in production format.
I sure hope M$ doesn't try something silly like a patent on this; it seems to me that FITS and the other formats used by the Medical and Geophysical Sciences would provide a wealth of prior art...
-- This
An article that appeared earlied this year in IEEE Pervasive Computing describes the principles of operation.
Diomidis Spinellis - #include "/dev/tty"