How Flickr's GeoTagging Made Me Lose 1/4 of 2008 posted
I love maps. I've always loved maps. I love seeing the places I've been on a map, crossing places off, and planning where I'll go next.
When I was a little kid, my grandma always gave me a calendar/planner from my grandpa's company. It was one of those little yearly pocket calendar things the size of a checkbook, you know. Well every year, I immediately opened it up to the map page (in the back) and highlighted the states I had been to. I did the same with ski resort brochures - highlighting all the trails I'd conquered - wondering when I'd have the courage to highlight those black diamonds.
I really love the perspective that maps give you.
I've also always loved photos. When new people came to my house as a kid, I pulled out photo albums and we went through them. I think it's a blast showing people your life. It's fun to see what people have done, where they've been, and how they've changed in their lives. I love it when people open that stuff up to me.
Obviously I've pushed my love of photos to the internet. They're much easier to manage, browse, and share via web apps. especially after the crazy amounts of time I've put into tagging and organization. It makes the photos more fun and personal.
And even though I've taken photos in plenty of interesting places, I've never really thought about integrating my photos with maps - until last June.
June 9th 2008 - the start of the end of my productive life.
I began playing with Flickr Geotagging. If you don't know about Flickr geotagging, it basically let's you drag photos that you've taken onto coordinates on a map. You can literally map any photo you've ever taken to fairly accurate coordinates.
I started off playing with a couple interesting vacation photos. Then I moved onto easy ones - like all those taken at my house. Fast forward a few months, I now have geotagged 12,000 photos - with only 500 left.
Guys, if there was ever a time in my life that you could've said, "you've got too much time on your hands," "you really need a hobby," or "derek, it's time for an intervention, let's go for a walk"... that time was this past quarter.
Geotagging seriously, seriously owned me. It sucked me in like a TV. Geotagging became this crazy game that I played - "how can I possibly figure out exactly where I took this photo." ...and I did. I used past emails, letters, I even called my lifelines. I found out exactly where I took about 12,000 photos. It was a great game.
But during this geotagging, I realized that Flickr sucks at displaying this data once it's been recorded. The thing that's super weird, is that it's easier to view your map while you're organizing it than it is as a visitor to my map. That is, if you look at my flickr map, it's way harder to use than when I log in, organize, and view it. That is horrible design.
I also began to really hate Yahoo Maps. It's better than Google maps in some rural areas, but it is sooooo freakin bad at city and state boundaries. There are tons of photos I've taken in the Quad Cities that are just plain wrong. Like all the ones i took in Iowa say they're in Illinois, and all the ones I took in Illinois say they're in Iowa. Seriously. It's straight up flip-flopped. How do you miss the giant Mississippi river separating the 2? wtf.
The coordinates were always correct, but this flickr/yahoo map frustration I had made me start thinking - why don't I use the Flickr API to pull my geotag data and store it in my website's database. So I quickly wrote some code to grab this data from Flickr, and yall did the work for me. Every time you viewed a photo on my site, if there was no geo data associated with that photo - it pulled it from Flickr. Thanks, yall!
And now that I've got all this data locally, I can attempt to display it better than Flickr! weeee!
So that said, Flickr geotagging, in turn, caused me to begin reworking my photos section. I fancied up the code to be more object oriented, and I tried to make browsing my photos more fun and more informative.
Check it out. Play around. Let me know what you think. Give me some suggestions. I'm not done - oh no. First of all, I need to figure out a smart way to fix those blasted incorrect cities/states.
Oh, and don't forget about keyboard shortcuts. Use your arrows or P/N keys to skip around between photos/pages.
When I was a little kid, my grandma always gave me a calendar/planner from my grandpa's company. It was one of those little yearly pocket calendar things the size of a checkbook, you know. Well every year, I immediately opened it up to the map page (in the back) and highlighted the states I had been to. I did the same with ski resort brochures - highlighting all the trails I'd conquered - wondering when I'd have the courage to highlight those black diamonds.
I really love the perspective that maps give you.
I've also always loved photos. When new people came to my house as a kid, I pulled out photo albums and we went through them. I think it's a blast showing people your life. It's fun to see what people have done, where they've been, and how they've changed in their lives. I love it when people open that stuff up to me.
Obviously I've pushed my love of photos to the internet. They're much easier to manage, browse, and share via web apps. especially after the crazy amounts of time I've put into tagging and organization. It makes the photos more fun and personal.
And even though I've taken photos in plenty of interesting places, I've never really thought about integrating my photos with maps - until last June.
June 9th 2008 - the start of the end of my productive life.
I began playing with Flickr Geotagging. If you don't know about Flickr geotagging, it basically let's you drag photos that you've taken onto coordinates on a map. You can literally map any photo you've ever taken to fairly accurate coordinates.
I started off playing with a couple interesting vacation photos. Then I moved onto easy ones - like all those taken at my house. Fast forward a few months, I now have geotagged 12,000 photos - with only 500 left.
Guys, if there was ever a time in my life that you could've said, "you've got too much time on your hands," "you really need a hobby," or "derek, it's time for an intervention, let's go for a walk"... that time was this past quarter.
Geotagging seriously, seriously owned me. It sucked me in like a TV. Geotagging became this crazy game that I played - "how can I possibly figure out exactly where I took this photo." ...and I did. I used past emails, letters, I even called my lifelines. I found out exactly where I took about 12,000 photos. It was a great game.
But during this geotagging, I realized that Flickr sucks at displaying this data once it's been recorded. The thing that's super weird, is that it's easier to view your map while you're organizing it than it is as a visitor to my map. That is, if you look at my flickr map, it's way harder to use than when I log in, organize, and view it. That is horrible design.
I also began to really hate Yahoo Maps. It's better than Google maps in some rural areas, but it is sooooo freakin bad at city and state boundaries. There are tons of photos I've taken in the Quad Cities that are just plain wrong. Like all the ones i took in Iowa say they're in Illinois, and all the ones I took in Illinois say they're in Iowa. Seriously. It's straight up flip-flopped. How do you miss the giant Mississippi river separating the 2? wtf.
The coordinates were always correct, but this flickr/yahoo map frustration I had made me start thinking - why don't I use the Flickr API to pull my geotag data and store it in my website's database. So I quickly wrote some code to grab this data from Flickr, and yall did the work for me. Every time you viewed a photo on my site, if there was no geo data associated with that photo - it pulled it from Flickr. Thanks, yall!
And now that I've got all this data locally, I can attempt to display it better than Flickr! weeee!
So that said, Flickr geotagging, in turn, caused me to begin reworking my photos section. I fancied up the code to be more object oriented, and I tried to make browsing my photos more fun and more informative.
Check it out. Play around. Let me know what you think. Give me some suggestions. I'm not done - oh no. First of all, I need to figure out a smart way to fix those blasted incorrect cities/states.
Oh, and don't forget about keyboard shortcuts. Use your arrows or P/N keys to skip around between photos/pages.
comments
so when are you going to make it so i can use your site to power my site?
harper posted
object oriented, ftw???
nick posted
i mean, you can't do OO programming in scripting language! php blows!
derek posted
thinkexist.com/quota...ivacy/
Random looker posted
wow random looker- that was a good comment. please participate on more blogs i frequent.
harper posted
What is the URL to your site ?
At the moment I am trying to find some simple way of creating a web Gallery with the possibility to search pictures by keywords, listen to one or two .mp3's belonging to the chosen picture AND be shown on a map where the picture was taken.
One application could be a bird picture database. Search the birds name, get the photo. Klick a button to hear the bird's song. Klick another to see where the picture was taken.
Do you have these possibilities in your picture database ?
Do you know a picture database with these possibilities that can be published on the web ? Has Flickr such possibilities?
/Rudi
Rudi posted