Vacation Photos That Inform Instead of Bore

A News.com story discusses the increasing trend towards adding metadata to casually created content. Their discussion centers around vacation photos taken with increasingly sophisticated cameras, and uploaded to ever more feature-rich websites. These photos, taken on a whim by snap-happy tourists, become invaluable for people wanting to follow in their footsteps. "It's the odd juxtapositions of randomly plotted photos that may be the most surprising--and useful--to travelers with more obscure interests. For example, fans of graffiti can search the word, 'graffiti,' and 'New York City' at Flickr.com/map, and pull up photos of freshly painted tags, all plotted with pushpins on a clickable Yahoo map. A search for 'Dumbo Brooklyn graffiti,' for example, finds some 99 photos, including the infamous 'Neck Face' tag, spray-painted on a brick warehouse at Jay and Front Streets in Brooklyn. Try finding that in a guidebook."

Comments

Neck Face

[magicchex]

I had to search for "Neck Face" specifically to find it, as the suggested search terms brought up 700+ photos, not the 99 claimed.

The Face Neck tag can be found here.

Re:Neck Face

[OS24Ever]

This is the problem i've had with meta-tagging. Someone uses a tag, and then 500 other people abuse it the second day, and it exponentially compounds so that it's hard to find things again.

Re:Cool

[Tribbin]

I'm not known for liking Microsoft, but check Photosynth:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

Privacy

[ushering05401]

About ten years ago I read a sci-fi story about a private investigator who had one ace up her sleeve.. She aggregated and mined vacation photos from the web using facial recognition software to track people when they were otherwise off the map. The plot line revolved around tracking someone who appeared in the background in something like two out of several million web-posted photos.

Not a terribly good story, but kinda interesting all the same. The author pointed out that with the number of recording devices constantly on the increase, and the impulse people have to 'share' their photos on the web, it would not require a big brother type scenario to see personal privacy become a thing of the past... even if you take hardcore measures to hide.

Oh, and the suggested google search to find 'neck face' returns a lot more than 99 photos.

Regards.

Re:Privacy

[jollyreaper]

Not a terribly good story, but kinda interesting all the same. The author pointed out that with the number of recording devices constantly on the increase, and the impulse people have to 'share' their photos on the web, it would not require a big brother type scenario to see personal privacy become a thing of the past... even if you take hardcore measures to hide. I have three words for you: Groucho Marx glasses. Solved.

Re:Glorifying Vandalism

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to know a guy who had a six foot high concrete wall around two sides of his property, he had a busy street right in front of his house. One morning he came out and found nearly the entire wall had been spray painted with an anti-war mural. It was technically an act of vandalism and selfish disregard for private property but he said he actually liked it more than a solid white wall and thought it was pretty cool artwork. He wanted to keep it but the city eventually forced him to have it removed after a lot of people complained about a few parts they considered "obscene".

Before you get too excited...

[djupedal]

"Try finding that in a guidebook."

The 'Lonely Planet' book series made all the difference when I first came to Asia...even inside China, 15 ~ years back. I'm sure metadata will be huge, someday. But it follows on the heals of other terrific resources that have already 'been there, done that' and will continue for quite some time I am sure.

I learned how to get the local Chinese police to help move me to my next destination - If you were caught inside the frontier, they were ordered to return you to the last city you visited. The trick was to tell them your next city instead of the last one - they would load you up and happily take you on to your next destination. Courtesy Lonely Planet - try finding that kind of help w/Flcker :)

Re:Before you get too excited...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are my personal observations from spending 1 month in China back in 1997.

The thing I remember most from my trip to China is the bodycount. I've never seen so many corpses lying around on the streets anywhere as I did on an early morning busride from Qufu to Jinan. I saw the remains of over 30 (we stopped counting at 30.. there were more) fatal vehicle accidents which ranged from cars and trucks hitting each other, pedestrians, bicyclists, immovable objects, and a donkey in one case. It was explained to me that the drivers in that particular area (province?) feel they conserve gas by driving without their headlights on at night (which I observed). I also noted in this area there generally weren't street lights.

A train ride from Qufu to Xi'an was also noteworthy in that our train apparently struck someone. The train came to a stop with the body right outside the train car behind mine. I watched in amazement as about 6 Chinese officials (I'm calling them officials because they appeared to be wearing uniforms) got off the train and stood around the body kicking/prodding it. They eventually (after about 5 minutes) dragged it onto the middle of the set of train tracks alongside ours, got back on our train and we continued on our (less-merry) way.

A taxi ride to get to a train station in Tsingdao resulted in police action against our taxi driver. While enroute, our taxi driver was waved to the side of the road by what appeared to be a police or military officer. The officer-type walked over to our cab and started arguing with the taxi driver. The driver pointed back at us. The cop-type person reached up and pulled the taxi sign off our driver's roof and started walking away. Our driver got out and went walking after the officer, at which point the officer turned around, drew his firearm (some kind of short-stock ak47 looking machinegun thing) and pointed it at the driver. My friend and I exited the cab and went running for the train station which was in view down the street.

I admit that most of these impressions I was left with were formed through a haze of not being remotely able to speak/parse/understand the Chinese language, but I'm certainly of the impression that actions speak louder than words. I have a slew of pictures and other impressions, but these are definitely the strongest. Its been 10 years since then and I remember the whole of the trip as if it were yesterday. While you would be hard-pressed to convince me to return, I am glad I went.

Re:Before you get too excited...

[djupedal]

"While you would be hard-pressed to convince me to return, I am glad I went."

Reminds me of the one visit I paid to Compton, southern Calif, back in....1978? Except I wasn't the least bit glad I went.

That person the train hit was most likely a suicide. Those uniforms were soldiers, assigned to ride the trains in case of trouble. Today, there are regular police, however, looking for baggage thieves, pickpockets, swindlers running cons, etc.

Same as in Japan, except in Japan you are expected to not pull this kind of stunt either during rush hour, or on a busy line so as to cause the least trouble to the fewest commuters. They used to publish monthly listings of the best places to jump onto the tracks... I think in the last 5 years, I've seen less than 1/2 dozen bodies...mostly people from the country crossing busy streets or riding bicycles out in traffic.

Those decade old photos should be up on Google/Picasso, as an example. China has changed in so many ways in just the last ten years...of course, many things have not, but to see the cities grow can be interesting, I think :)

Re:Glorifying Vandalism

[Chibi Merrow]

Okay, and for every story that you can dredge up where someone was happy with having their property "artistically vandalized" I can probably find at least ten where the opposite was true. If the people involved with putting up that mural really wanted to get their message out, and the guy really had no problem with it, then there would have been no harm in asking for PERMISSION first.

Re:Cool

[suv4x4]

I'm not known for liking Microsoft, but check Photosynth:

Don't worry, we won't eat you alive even if you liked Microsoft. It's a damn company.

...or inform **and** bore

[VidEdit]

...being informative and being boring are not mutually exclusive. There is no reason vacation photos can't do **both**.

Re:Camera with LCD keyboard

[Lumpy]

What would be nice is a nice point and shoot digital that was affordable, had decent lenses and did n ot take a week to take a photo.

I use digital SLR cameras, when I press the shutter, it takes that photo within 2-20 milliseconds. That exact moment you were trying to capture was captured successfully. All point and shoots piss me off as they delay from .25 to almost 1 second to take the damned photo, that exact moment is long gone. That fricking sucks when you know what you are doing to take a good photo.

I like the portability of a point and shoot. When I'm off riding on the recumbent I hate having a SLR on my neck and would love a nice point an shoot, but I want one that take a photo the exact millisecond I press the shutter (if it's on) I want decent glass lenses that dont give either purple fringing (Like all Olympus digitals) or out of focus at the edge (like all Kodak digitals) or bizzare focus decisions. (Like all current Canon digitals Point and shoots. Earlier canon like the A20 were incredible)

Get rid of movie mode, audio, GPS, Loran, Cellphone, video playback, mp3, or Video games and give me a digital point and shoot camera that does not suck.

Re:Cool

[maxume]

I don't have the bandwidth to look at the video, but this program offers some different ways of browsing photos(as opposed to the ACDSee alikes):

http://www.windsorinterfaces.com/photomesa-downloa d.shtml

(Windows+.Net)

Been there, done that

[fermion]

Any open system of that allows open submission of audience created data will, as soon as it becomes popular enough, be abused by commercial interests. Planning a trip to Cancun, most hits will be fly by night vacation offers. Planning a trip to the Philippines, most ads will soon be targeted to the exotic sex tourist. The signal to noise ratio, even with rated content, quickly becomes overwhelming.

The only way that metadata can become useful is if there is little commercial interest and the normal urge for mere annoyance is purposefully squelched.

Goatse Geomapped, Finally!

[DavidD_CA]

Finally I can geomap Goatse pictures to make for a more efficient search.

Check it out.

This technology is great!