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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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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/
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
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
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.
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