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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.
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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.
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.
nothing new, other websites have done this before flickr, such as http://smugmug.com/
-khang
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.
http://www.flickr.com/map/
Geotagging would work better if cameras had GPS recievers built-in, or used a GPS equipped phone linked via bluetooth.
:)
Why not use one?
I've gotten to play with them a bit. The cameras that support the GPS cards are nothing too amazing. But we are usually using them for geology field work and such to help locate where our pictures were taken when trudging through endless stretches of desert.
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 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."
Is it just me or does smugmug seem down?
They are coming sooner rather than later. Should be interesting to build up large maps using timestamps and GPS locations to map out holidays. There have been a few times when I have gone on day long tours and been driven all over the place only to forget a few placenames and have to spend quite a lot of time figuring out where I went on maps. GPS photos would certainly make that a lot easier. I imagine that camera phones will be some of the first to integrate it since GPS is in demand on them and the camera functionality is getting better all the time.
Warhammer forums
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.
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Agreed. I think geotagging (of the photos themselves, by the camera) is a sleeper feature. It's not something that people know that they want, but it's something that once people get it, they're going to wonder how they ever lived without it. Not because looking at LAT/LON coordinates in iPhoto is particularly interesting, but because it lets you build a whole range of neat utilities, using your photo album as a data source.
For example, if your camera records GPS data, you don't need to keep a detailed itinerary anymore. Your camera becomes your field notebook, particularly if it can record videos and voice notes. When you get back from your vacation, you could have a utility that would plot a map showing the route you took, and letting you click on each "stop" (where a stop could be any place where you took a predetermined number of photos in a particular radius, say 10 photos within 5 miles) and replay your trip.
You can do obvious searches that are difficult now: "show me all my photos from Connecticut" is trivial when they're geotagged; without this, you'd have to hope that you tagged them correctly by hand. And of course, the process of tagging itself becomes easier when you can do batch operations based on the coordinates; pulling out and tagging photos that you took on a particular trip is easy, and doesn't require good organizational skills.
In the same way that people simply take advantage of the time/date stamps that most cameras embed in the EXIF data right now, without really thinking about it, is how people will use GPS data if and when it becomes ubiquitious.
The major problem with adopting it is that the camera manufacturers don't seem to exactly be in a hurry to add it as a feature (which is too bad of them, because it seems like they need some compelling features to drive upgrades, now that the megapixel race seems to have reached a plateau where most consumers are satisfied), and there aren't a lot of standard interfaces for attaching an outboard GPS. (At least not that I've seen.)
Linking digital cameras and cellphones over Bluetooth is probably the best bet, since it would allow both for easy geotagging (using the phone's GPS) and sharing (use phone as modem/email-device), however this has the downside of requiring most people to upgrade two devices, rather than just one.
"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