GeoTagging Flickr / Discuss

scalleja    says:

Hi Raymond,

we have developed a free geotaging service in BeeLoop and now working in a geocoding for resolve addresses and we will thank for any suggestion anyone will make us.

I am new in Flickr and never saw the Geoblogger application so please, what about to make a wish list with several work-points and start to programming it?

Thank,

Sergio
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

Louis Rossouw    says:

i want to see the google earth network link that would show the photos geotagged in flickr in my current view on google earth. that would be great.

that was how i found flickr!
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

Яick Harris    says:

This is a great idea -- I have code that will collect picture information based on the presence of the tag: geotag. It saves the results to an XML file.

I also have code that will present the geotagged lat/lng on a google map. It uses the google maps and flickr APIs. Nothing fancy (nothing exposed as an API, nothing saved to a database), but I am sure someone will find it valuable for re-use.
I will add the link when I get home.

-R
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

ChicagoSage    says:

Sergio,

Geobloggers had a really large scope, which is probably why it was hard to maintain as a personal project. But since you asked, here are the Geobloggers features I can remember off the top of my head:

1) It authenticated to Flickr, then it would load your newest photos, which you could place on the map. It would create geotags for the location and send them back to Flickr as tags to the photo.

2) You could go to any location on the map and see all nearby Flickr photos that had been geotagged. I think it had all the geotagged photo thumbnails cached locally so it didn't overload Flickr.

3) You could see all geotagged photos for a particular Flickr user.

4) It provided lots of RSS feeds, including feeds for photos added in a particular area and feeds for individual Flickr users.

5) It had a link to a KML file for GoogleEarth for each view.

Geobloggers also had some cool features that weren't related to Flickr. You could add notes and links to the map that others could view. I had used this to make a travelogue for a vacation last year. Here is a screenshot of what the Geobloggers links looked like: blog.360.yahoo.com/chicagosage?p=67 .

If I remember anything else, I'll post it here.

Brian
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

Aldo van Zeeland    says:

geoblogger (look a like) is already back @ geobloggers.tafoni.net/ although with limited functionality
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

.CK says:

Yuan.CC Maps can do the following things:

1. Retrieve geotagged photos and place markers on map.
2. Add geotags
3. Add photos to geo-groups
4. Put the link in photo description. Follow the link and it will bring users to see where the photo was taken. ( e.g. www.flickr.com/photos/ckyuan/113647200/ )
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

Rev Dan Catt    says:

Anyone out there willing to create a service to replace what geobloggers.com did? Not a small task, and maybe one that will ultimately be provided by Flickr. There are other mapping services of geotagged flickr images -- but none that I know of that aggregates the geotagging information and making it available via an API.

adamsplugins says:

On the topic of hypothetical API's.

I'd like to see some kind of support for the idea of geographic "importance". e.g. When I pull 50 pictures for Ontario I'd expect to see pictures of major landmarks (CN Tower, Big Nickle in Sudbury, Parliment buildings etc) and not pictures of peoples houses.

Not sure the best way to accomplish this, let me specify a tag in the API, and use my own tag heirarchy (see PhotoMap), or add this as seperate geodata like this potential API will do with lat/long.

Might also be nice to let folks edit/vote on the importance so when I tag my house as a major landmark others can contribute to this.

If I need to do this with a tag, perhaps a list of recommended tag values?

A
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

Rev Dan Catt    says:

Ok, I can come at this from a couple of angles.

#1

And this is solid fact that I believe I'm allowed to say, rather than hypothetical :)

Yahoo! snapped up a company called Where On Earth, who specialise in all sorts of location stuff. They have a huge database of POIs (Points of Interest, CN Tower, Big Nickle in Sudbury, Parliment buildings etc) as well as demographic region stuff.

We can (internal Yahoo! 'we' here) query the WoE dataset with a lat/long and get back nearby POIs, which can also depend on 'zoom level' i.e. the POIs you get back while working at street level ('monument x') can be different to those at country level ('west coast').

I stress that I only happen to know this because I walk past them on the way to the office where I work down in London, not because I have any specific need to know what they do! I often see some of them adjusting the flow of a river because the water level has risen or some such (those maps tiles don't make themselves you know!) it's quite interesting to see.

Now onto theory level. If Yahoo! had a system (randomly off the top of my head ... say ... Yahoo! Local) that allowed you to add a 'thing' onto a map, it *could* offer you a list of nearby POIs that you may want to 'tag' your 'thing' with, or alternatively store the IDs of those POIs internally (or indeed both).

So if you said give me 'things' that referance Arch de Triumph you may have some success.

Pictures of people's houses probably wouldn't have many POIs attached to them.

So that's that, in theory.

#2

On a purely hypothetical level...

When you view photos on flickr, you can either see them in order of latest first, going to oldest, or there's this fun wacky thing called interestingness that uses super secret magic to work out what photos are interesting. If I happened to request a number of photos, that had something specific about them, ummmm, lets say, they where all photographed within a defined area, and I got back what flickr considered the most interesting ones first. There's a good chance that the most interesting ones I got back first wouldn't be of someone's pet dog playing in the back yard. If I could indeed do such a thing.

(of course from flickr there are other ways of getting photos back, such as by set or group, but lets not even go there atm)
Originally posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )
Rev Dan Catt (a group admin) edited this topic 44 months ago.

adamsplugins says:

re: #2

I think it was well proven that photos retrieved by interestingness will contain a preponderance of cats...

The problem is that "interesting" is not really the same as "best for a map".
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

Jef Poskanzer    says:

"Interesting" is not really that interesting! Because it tries to be a single global metric. Those never work.
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

adamsplugins says:

It's not that interesting doesn't work. I think "interesting" pictures, in general, are.

I just doubt it will give me what I want in the context of "50 pictures within bounding box X". I guess I stick with tag hacks...
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

Flickmor    says:

Adam -

I think we have an answer for your question. We (Yahoo! Research Berkeley) have built a system that will do exactly what you ask - look at the data, decide where the important stuff is. We call it "summarization".

We will have a short paper in the upcoming WWW conference. I can send it to you - Flickrmail me your email address.

Here's the abstract:


We describe a framework for automatically selecting a summary set of photographs from a large collection of geo-referenced photos. The summary algorithm is based on spatial patterns in photo sets, but can be expanded to support social, temporal, as well as textual-topical factors of the photo set. The summary set can be biased by the user, the content of the user’s query, and the context in which the query is made. An initial evaluation on a set of geo-referenced photos shows that our algorithm performs well, producing results that are highly rated by users.

Mor
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

Jef Poskanzer    says:

So I'm about to release a new map application and if geobloggers was still around I would link there to show photos near the current location. Any suggestions on what I should do instead?
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

.CK says:

Jef Poskanzer,

You can try Yuan.CC Maps by giving the query string of lon=xxx, lon=yyy, and service=flickr.
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

aefitzhugh    says:

Dan, Mor, you guys are killing me, throw some stuff over the wall already :-).

Virgil would love to use your POI etc. functionality.
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

mortimer?    says:

This is great!

do you plan a "service" to access your database? I already have a few ideas of GM scripts from that ;)
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

.CK says:

And certainly the focus is, errr, I mean, could possibly be, providing APIs so that people can build geoblogger.com killers, without having to suck down all the data to their own database. And APIs to add/update geodata without having to resort to 'geotagged' hacks for uploaders and photo management apps, etc. etc.

Rev Dan Catt    says:

mortimerpa_

From a Flickr point of view I'm pretty sure (99.99999%) we'll not be providing direct access (or even API access) to the database, that's not really our thing.

But I think there's a chance it'll surface via another branch of Yahoo! in one form or another at somepoint.

To be honest, I suspect, and this is pure speculation, that the Where On Earth ppl were aquired mainly to help target adverts. And other people in Yahoo! have gone "No wait! We now have all this cool information, how can we use it"

.CK

As always, that rocks!
Posted 44 months ago. ( permalink )

mrjoro    says:

I hate to be one of those "any update?" guys but, um, any update? :) I've got an idea for YAFGMMU (yet-another-flickr-Google-Maps-mashup), and having a flickr API call that could give me photos in a specific area would make me very happy.

Though maybe I'd have better luck if I said it was a flickr-Yahoo! Maps mashup instead. :)

(By the way, I'm assuming the Yahoo! Research paper mentioned earlier is available online now? You all sound like you have fun jobs. :))
Posted 42 months ago. ( permalink )

dreadsword    says:

Update - www.blockrocker.com mashes up geoblogged Flickr photos, and offers an API-based geotagging tool:
www.blockrocker.com/service_flickr.php

Also mashes up video from youtube and blog posts from technorati - just add standard geo:lon, geo:lat, and "geotagged" tags to your posts or videos and they'll be pulled into Blockrocker.

Regards,
--Rod.
Posted 42 months ago. ( permalink )