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Flickr Launches Drag and Drop Geotagging
Thomas Hawk writes "Flickr today launched a mash up of sorts creating a tool in their organizer where users can use Yahoo! maps to geotag their photographs at Flickr. The new feature allows Flickr users the ability to simply drag and drop their photos onto a map, filter their photos by tags in order to geotag, and use interesting search technology to browse photos that have been geotagged on Flickr maps."
I was worried they'd use uninteresting search technology, and that it would have blown the whole thing.
I'm glad to see they decided to go with the interesting technology instead.
Good call, Flickr!
I personally prefer Zooomr's, It uses Google Maps and is more functional than FlickR (and offers free accounts to bloggers)
http://sohilsblog.blogspot.com
I wonder if this geotagging could be combined with this photo tourism technology?
Furthermore, perhaps these photo tourism 3D reconstructions could then be combined with google earth so you could literally browse the planet.
Neato.
My Computer Music Tutorial Videos
And yet, they still do not support subsets (categories). :/
Does it count as a mash-up if the technologies are both from the same company?
Being anonymous is not cowardice.
Come on, that was pretty good information. Though I would have preferred a link to Zooomr.
I also prefer the google maps integration.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can't imagine anyone giving it a positive review... I just spent the past 1/2 hour of my life trying to use the interface. In both N6 and IE6 and it's just... simply.. broken. Frustratingly so! And I simply adore how when I attempt to search on my latitude/longitude coordinates (because other attempts at navigation fail) it send me to some place in England... not even a mistake regarding E/W longitude.
This could be amazingly useful... if one could just use it.
Which is worse...
1) The fact that I knew about this the minute it was available
or
2) That I know who Thomas Hawk is because of Flickr?
There's more nifty info on the Flickrblog: http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/2006/08/great_sh ot_wher.html
Apparently Safari support is currently broken, but will be fixed shortly.
Geotagging would work better if cameras had GPS recievers built-in, or used a GPS equipped phone linked via bluetooth.
nothing new, other websites have done this before flickr, such as http://smugmug.com/
-khang
A sustainable business model!
The sad part about this is that Yahoo maps is soo bad.. And the flash-based beta version is even worse, it looks like a cheap rip-off of google maps, but that doesn't work properly. Any Yahooer should be ashamed of it. They can't do AJAX like Google. Shame on Yahoo.
Am I the only one that misread the headline to say 'Flickr launces drap and drop ghetto-gagging'?
Hands down the illest ventriloquist this side of the Mississippi River, Hah!
http://www.flickr.com/map/
Yes. I can just about guarantee you were the absolute only one.
Here is a more specific URL:
http://maps.smugmug.com/
It isn't quite drag-and-drop, you have to enter latitude and longitude unless your camera embeds GPS information in the EXIF metadata. But it works well, using Google Maps API. It integrates somewhat with Google Earth, too.
They have had this feature for several months now, and have already revved it once or twice.
If they're going for the "Wow Effect", they're a year late. Pictures in maps... I'm sorry, am I supposed to be impressed? Drag and drop, mapped pictures, picture text searches, all great, but none new. I think they did a good job, and its a welcome addition to their site, but I don't think it's going to generate the buzz they think it might. It will, imho, simply keep them competitive with the bigger draws out there, like YouTube.
If and when they release a code snippet to embed these in your own page (maybe they have, I don't know), then this will certainly be a big hit among users (though still not technically impressive). Imagine all the MySpace users who would flood to their service if they could organize their pictures by location, and even by friend's picture collections, and add it directly to their page.
As it stands now, though, this is about as exciting as watching your friend buy last year's hot computer gadget after you've already played with it for a year. They've caught up, but they've not moved ahead.
I8-D
Your it!
I read it "Flickr launches 'Drag' and drops 'Geotagging'
I claim prior art on 'Drag and Drop Ghetto Tagging'.
I live in Japan and it is impossible to actually geo tag your pictures, because the smaller zoom ranges are not in the yahoo DB yet. Well, sadly flickr was bought by yahoo, so they cannot use the google maps which are way more detailed way more better.
What I do not understand is, why yahoo can not use the yahoo japan maps which are highly accurte. Seems I have to wait quite some more time before I can start do any geo tagging.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
You don't have to enter the coordinates, you can just navigate around the world and click where it was taken. Though it still annoyingly defaults to some street in California that you have to zoom out from to find where you want.
Ask.com's has no dragging or scrolling, doesn't show local things on the map with pop-up details, doesn't allow you to click to recenter the map, has no satellite photo view, no combined satellite/roadmap view, doesn't fill the available browser window space...uh...how is it better than Google's again?
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Yes, I think that street is their headquarters. Although you can navigate around the world as you say, it's such a pain to get there from California that I hardly find that method useful at all.
It's MUCH faster to quickly use Google Earth to navigate there and get the coordinates that way, then type them in.
Is it just me or does smugmug seem down?
Just used it - looks nifty, but it's DAMN slow, and there is no easy way to un-geotag a batch of your photos (at least not through the map interface - not good if you stuff up).
The whole world map doesn't look like it has many photos on there from the pink dots, but it lists many more in the 'total photos' - so I think it is a little buggy right now. The photos I Just added didn't come up when I tried to narrow the search through the main page either.
I think the site is a little too slow right now - I hope they improve it though, and find a better way to present the millions of photos which will soon populate the map.
You'll get much more information here for Flickr and other photo geotagging tools. It includes stories about loc.alize.us, geotagged photos browsing in Google Earth, Picasa photos in Google Earth, see this specific story on geocoding photos with the numerous related stories, Flickrmap.com, etc. Yup, this is a shameless plug, but hey, slashgeo does really provide information on the topic (and there's no ads by the way).
Animoog.org
Well, there's the very slight problem that it costs almost $900 and is only 3.2 megapixels; I was interested until I saw that.
It's unfortunate that the major camera manufacturers don't work out a standardized interface for addons; something as simple as a serial interface to connect an outboard GPS would be fine, although the ability to use a single type of CF GPS cards would be better.
Of course, interoperability has never been chief on the camera manufacturers' minds; these are the same people that can barely standardize on a flash hot-shoe. Perhaps when their business starts to get squeezed by 'convergence'-type devices, they'll come around.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
GPSPhotoLinker uses the GPS track timestamps to figure out the closest LAT/LON to where your photo was taken. I'm a mac guy... I know there is software for Windows as well.
We have been working hard on it. Hope you like it ;)
Eduardo
I did a quick overview of the main features (with screencaps) at Flickr's built-in geocoding - your photos on Yahoo Maps. In addition to geotags, it will take EXIF geocoded photos, but only if you set a preference and only for new photos uploaded after the pref is set.
If this thing gets real widely used, then you could probably construct bullet-time styled video clips:
1. find a landmark (like Eiffel Tower)
2. Draw a circle around it on the map and get as many photos near to the shape as possible, preserve them in the same circular order
3. Now check them, probably many (or some) of them include Eiffel Tower. Discard all others
4. Add them as individual frames to the clip.
Since people around large objects probably tend to take a shot or two of these objects, this idea might work.
I know you won't get anywhere near decent quality like that, but the effect should still be there. You might want to resize and position the frames so the Eiffel tower will stand in the middle.
Instead of a circle, you could try an ellipse. That way the end result can be even more interesting.
The term geotagging is being slightly misused by Flickr in my opinion.
For some real geomapping (and a great way to waste time), see Wikimapia which lets you tag Google Maps.
www.wikimapia.org