GeoTagging Flickr / Discuss

herr akx says:

I'd rather see Flickr exporting their location data to the tags. The city I live in is about 3 centimeters wide in yahoo maps (most of Spain is like that, if not all), in Google maps it's detailed to street level, with names. It'd be dead easy to keep them synced for them. A button to reimport the geotagged images would be nice (maybe it's there and I've not found it)
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

tones_space says:

Initially I was very impressed with this new functionality, but after a little thought, am very very disappointed with the dropping of tags.

The onus should be on choice, choice is good. 3pd's should be able to choose whether to stick with conventional tags (you know, those tried and tested little tags that are also applicable on blogs, taggable in technorati, del.icio.us etc etc and are fast becoming the agreed standard) or use the new in-house api methods. Users should be able to have the choice of manually inserting tags their way, using a 3pd tool or using the in-house map.

What the flickr tool should do is automatically search for the tags and do it's magic for us, no matter how those tags got there. If undermining the tagging interface is an issue, then hide those tags after they have been automatically flickr-location-ized (not semi-manual as we have been forced to do). If the geoprivacy thing is the issue, then allow us to put in a tag such as geoprivate after the normal tags, then do the magic and hide them all.

Please, reconsider the tag issue.
Originally posted 70 months ago. (permalink)
tones_space edited this topic 70 months ago.

mortimer?    says:

The issue is probably that processing numerical data mixed in the tags is far more difficult than having a dedicated database with simple floats in them.

Anyway, Flickr has not removed the geotags for my images when I synched. I am working on a small GM script to add the geotags from the flickr geo info... Should be available before tomorrow.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

R4vi    says:

Thanks mortimer!
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

herr akx says:

Mine are there too mortimer. And extracting from the EXIF the coordinates is great. My only gripe is that (for now I hope) you can't really geotag in Spain with yahoo maps, so creating the tags automagically for interfacing with the 3rd party sites would have been great. Same with providing a way to import new files with tags.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

mortimer?    says:

Ok, first version is availlable:
1- get Firefox
2- install Greasemonkey
3- restart firefox
4- Go here to install the script:
userscripts.org/scripts/show/5383

On each photo page, just under "Taken in ..." you'll have two new options:
- "add geotags" which will add the usual "geotagged, geo:lon and geo:lat"
- "add place tags" which will add tags for the place given by the "Taken in..." point.
Originally posted 70 months ago. (permalink)
mortimer? edited this topic 70 months ago.

Jef Poskanzer    says:

I prefer to keep the tags for now because I prefer to keep on using my own Google-based map interface for locating photos, because Yahoo!'s maps kind of suck. So my question is, is the import-from-geotags thing a one-time operation or will the system keep on importing any future photos that I add geotags to? I'm guessing it's a one-time thing. I'd like to have a way to make it keep on importing.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

herr akx says:

Wow, that was fast mortimer! thanks a lot :D
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

herr akx says:

jef I've seen this url on other thread: flickr.com/account/geo/import

I don't know how long it will last though
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

mortimer?    says:

Jef Poskanzer, I suppose you will have to update (or his author) the Google-based tool to use the new API to set locations of photos (instead of calling the api to get/add tags, use the API to get/set latitude of the photo).

But I agree, the details of Yahoo is still a bit poorer than Google, but an update has been mentioned (on an other thread). In my case, in York UK, Satelite wise, Yahoo=Google, streetmap wise Yahoo<Google...

I just saw that the geotag I did put with the GMIF tool (google map) are not exactly at the same place on the yahoo sat view. There is some alignment discrepancy apparently.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Stewart    says:

The import thingie will continue to work indefinitely, so you can continue to use it.

I'm about to hop in the car, but: there's no need to continue with the "geotagged/geo:lat=/geo:long=" over the long term, just like there's no need for "metadatatagged/metadata:title=/metatada:timeanddatetaken=". The APIs will be available shortly (we just need to do stress testing first) and you can continue to use your geotagging tool of choice AND outside developers can use Flickr to do their spatial indexing which will free them up to do more creative things.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Jef Poskanzer    says:

Yes, I will certainly be changing ACME Mapper to use the new API calls for finding location data, in addition to looking for 'geotagged' and the EXIF data. However I'm not sure I want to use the API for setting location data. My user interface would get a lot more complicated for very little if any improvement in usability. The way I do it now is really quite ok. Navigate to the location, select the geotags, paste them into the flickr window, boom you're done. Unless flickr comes out with an API for doing drag&drop to flickr windows, I'm not going to be able to improve on that. So, I expect to keep adding geotags, and would like to see flickr add a hook to the tag processor so it automatically imports any new geotags as they are added.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

mikel_maron    says:

Stewart said..

just like there's no need for "metadatatagged/metadata:title=/metatada:timeanddatetaken=".

Dawn Endico    says:

Jef: There's a way to insert actual latitude and longitude numbers by hand although it takes 2 pastes instead of just one.

- Go to the map tab in organizer.
- select the pictures you want to tag.
- drag them to the map.
- click the edit photo link
- choose the location tab
- paste in the latitude and longitude
- save and then go to the next photo in the location and paste in lat and lon to the new photo.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Stewart    says:

A secret: sometimes, internally, we call the tripletags "machine tags" (partly since it will annoying RDFers if we call them tripletags, since they aren't exactly the same ...) But yeah, they won't go away, but they might be hidden or at least display differently in the UI. And their constituents might be made more easily searchable.

But, Jef - that's a good point. ZoneTag, the mobile client from Yahoo!'s Berkeley Research lab (http://research.yahoo.com/zonetag/) has the concept of "action tags" which get parsed and turned into instructions (like "rotate" or "add to group x") but don't actually get added as tags. We could do something like that ...
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

*ade    says:

Will the API support Google Maps with the new Yahoo created data, or is it now locked down to Yahoo only?

i.e. Does the new map data use a proprietary or open system?
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Stewart    says:

The API just produces the data in XML format, so it doesn't really "support" Yahoo! or Google maps (or MSN or Mapquest, etc.) ... that's up to the developer.

It's no different than anything else in Flickr - in one sense proprietary (Flickr is not open source and it is owned by a for-profit corporation), in another sense open since anyone can get at the data.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

*ade    says:

Good. My fear was that the map data in the XML would be reduced to an arbitrary URI that pointed to Yahoo Maps.

And yes I meant open and not 'open source' in my previous post :)
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Mr Jaded says:

Stewart - do you know whether Yahoo plan to improve their maps? I live in an obscure little town called London on the remote island of Great Britain and the level of detail is shockingly sparse, with only the rivers, railways and motorways visible.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

*ade    says:

Yes, it does become somewhat pointless with the level of detail being as it is.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Ian Tomey    says:

Not just that the maps are sparse, but they are inaccurate as well. Was just trying to mark some photos from Bideford in Devon, and yahoo maps has the railway crossing the river 5 times before reaching Torrington, when in fact it is one one side of the river and never crosses
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

tomsoft says:

First, congratulation to Flickr for this long awaited improvment! ;-)

Adding function to do spatial search is fine, but why do we need to go to this import phase? Privacy level did not fundamentally changed, and all the data are available.
Is there any reason why this import is not automatic?

Also, I would like to keep the ability to set location of a picture through tags. It's easiest and faster than doing separate calls, especially from mobile ( www.Mobup.org and j2memap.landspurg.net )

Lastly, the geotaging triplet was a kind of standard accross sites for tagging information, so why not just keep it? (while keeping the extra search feature)
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Peter Konnecke says:

Definately don't drop the tags and if you're in Australia ... don't even consider changing the way you GEOTAG. There is no street level data for Yahoo Maps in Australia.

I've just imported my pictures across to the Flickr system and the accuracy is terrible. There is a much better chance of accurately positioning your pictures using Google Maps via Yuan.CC or others.

I can't believe how the Yahoo Map could get it so wrong .... I mena LAT is LAT and LON is LON.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Sam Judson    says:

I get the impression that if your tags also contain 'location' style information then the photos have been 'repositioned'.

For example I have a large selection of photos taken in different locations throughout Newcastle, here in the UK. However now I look at my flickr-maps it just shows 81 photos in exactly the same place (and yes, I have tried zooming in completely). All of these photos contained the tag 'newcastle' and 'uk' as well as the geotagged and geo:lat and geo:lon tags...
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Sam Judson    says:

update; nah - my geotags where just all in the same place and very inaccurate.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

ekurvine    says:

...About triple tags:

I understand there is some concern about Tripletags spamming tag clouds. This new approach to geotagging may partially solve the issue (and obviously this is not the only motive for the new in-built features). However, tags & tripletags provide a convenient, transparent and relative uniform interface for mashing-up flickr with various 3rd party projects. This does not involve only geotagging.

So Dear Team Flickr, while at it, why don’t you also provide in-house support for BT tagged photos, tripletagged photos telling the moon phase, of tripletags that refer to somehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/clusterurispaceowlhome/ that resides outside Flickr…

Seriously, the point is that the new map features are great, but after this type of improvements – if you no longer generate tags for those who have use for them – it becomes more difficult to build apps/widgets that COMBINE various tagging schemes, for example these good old geo tags combined with sensor information, human activity types or whatever conceivable contextual things that can be recorded with smart devices. So far we have not seen such combinations, but we should avoid a situation that altogether prevents them.
Originally posted 70 months ago. (permalink)
ekurvine edited this topic 70 months ago.

Brian Zhang Larsen    says:

I am all in for triple tags.

But another issue that i could be somewhat concerned about is that, the lack of detail on the yahoo maps, leads to very imprecise geotagging. Already I see a lot of places with "a lot" of photos, that were not taken precisely there, or maybe not even in the same city area or even city. I can not rule out laziness of the new geotaggers, but I seriously hope that yahoo would get themselves together and make it easier to tag. Detailed location is an important part of geo browsing for me.

As for myself I will keep on using triple tagging tools for a while, so I have my detailed info available on the many google maps implementations around, inclusive my own.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

mortimer?    says:

@Brian, have you seen the question of accuracy when tagging with the flickr tool. They said on their blog:
"You can drag anywhere onto the map - a degree of "accuracy" is inferred by your current zoom level, so if you just want to show the city or general area a photo was taken, you can drag them on at a medium zoom level and those photos won't show up in odd places for people zoomed right down to street level."

That's probably a good idea as people will be lazy or won't remember the exact place of their photo (we don't all have a gps on hand all the time).

You might be able to add a accuracy=1 parameter in your searches so that you get only the accurate photos.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

mdmarkus66    says:

I have ab't 400 or so geotagged (the old way), and the map tool imported ab't 150 of them. Not sure why it didn't pick up the rest, but there doesn't seem to be a way to get it to try again. I'd very much like to keep them as geotags, and be able to sync flickr's db with what i update (as well as sync my geotags w' what's in flickr's db).
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Brian Zhang Larsen    says:

@Mortimer?, Ahh great. I did'nt see that, but that sounds like a great idea.

@mdmarkus66, when did you import? My import took a little while (15 min), and slowly more and more of my geotagged photos where available on the map.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

mdmarkus66    says:

Brian: I imported around 11am (EDT) today. I also followed a link to kick off a background import maybe 20 min' ago so we'll see what comes of that. I actually haven't found the link on any of flickr's pages, it was posted here.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Rev Dan Catt    says:

@ekurvine

"Seriously, the point is that the new map features are great, but after this type of improvements – if you no longer generate tags for those who have use for them – it becomes more difficult to build apps/widgets that COMBINE various tagging schemes"

We've never generated geo tags for users (or any other types, yet), they've always been added by 3rd party tools. Developers are free to choose what they want to do. They could use just the API to set the location, or just the machine tags (tripleTags) or both, totally up to them.

As for combining with other data that should be pretty straight forwards too. Because you'll be able to append a bounding box parameter onto the flickr.photo.search method, you can continue to search for other tags, but filtered by area.

Example, if there's a bunch of photos tagged with flickr:user=revdancatt because they have me in them. I could use the API to find all photos taken of me in Austin, San Francisco or the UK.

The spatial searching isn't possible against traditional geotags, which is why this is better.

@mortimer? You'll want accuracy=14/15/16. 1 is world level, 4 is "I kinda know it was taken in France", 16 is corner of the street stuff. The higher the value the more accurate it is, this way as things get more accurate we can increase the value.

Not sure why you'd want to geotag your macro photography but you know ;)
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Stewart    says:

I'm not sure if people really get this, but there is NO correlation between triple tags and Yahoo! or Google maps. The Flickr geo API methods, which will be released the very moment we're done the last round of stress testing, will make it easier ^H^H^H^H

er ... now we've released the APIs while I was still writing this. Anyway, this will make it a lot easier for 3rd party developers to create good stuff, and if you want to use Google Maps (or WIndows Live or the various European, Chinese, Japanese, Indian mapping services) to do the geotagging or display, then god bless you. Triple tags don't make this any more or less possible (just slightly messier and more difficult, but if someone wants to continue use them then that's fine too).

Mr. Jaded: "do you know whether Yahoo plan to improve their maps? I live in an obscure little town called London on the remote island of Great Britain and the level of detail is shockingly sparse, with only the rivers, railways and motorways visible."

Yes, of course. Remember that today is just one day in the grand flow of time. Remember: if we had launched a few months ago with Google maps underneath, you would have said exactly the same thing. It will get a lot better (and so will all the competitive services, and that's all good). But it's new tech and it's much more complicated than it looks, and most of the complexity is in the data licensing and stuff like that. (The US is usually first in these things because the US government, to their credit, does a lot more to make geodata publicly available).
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Stewart    says:

Oops - link to geo API announcement: groups.yahoo.com/group/yws-flickr/message/2161
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

mortimer?    says:

@Dan, I was guessing for the accuracy levels...

For the macro, let say you take a macro of particularly rare insect or flower, then it could be interesting to know where it has been taken.

Nature being highly regional when we are talking of small things, so being able to identify them and where is their habitat is a good thing.

But then, Flickr is probably not the best place to do that ;)

@Stewart, thank you for the API, I was not expecting it so quick. We'll have to brainstorm our free time now :D
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Joe_B    says:

@Rev Dan Cat, you brought up interesting query - pictures of people, vs pictures of geography.

Are there any plans for a hidden data field specifying that this "people-shot" or a closeup of a bug, vs. a picture of the area?

I was considering keeping a "geotagged" tag to indicate photo is geographic in nature rather than a people shot?

or should some new tag be created?

I'm not sure i need to "hide" the photo from searches if it's a public photo, but the context might be helpful to others who are trying to filter their searches (espeically when the map has 20+pages)

What are everyones thoughts?
Originally posted 70 months ago. (permalink)
Joe_B edited this topic 70 months ago.

Canopus Archives    says:

Having travelled to and taken photos in countries where even Google Earth is not too detailed never mind Yahoo Maps I invested in a GPS unit to record my tracks and synchronise with where my photos were taken. It will always give better accuracy than any Internet map so from now on I will be inserting geotags with coordinates taken from it and displayed as conventional tags. I will still be importing the geotagged photos into Flickr Maps as well as using Flickrfly to allow people with Google Earth to fly to the location. That way, hopefully, as the Internet map technology improves the maps will be able to position my photos using my geotags with greater accuracy as time goes on.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

David de Groot    says:

Canopus, if you also include the GPS co-ordinates in your EXIF data before uploading, flickr will automatically place them on the map (providing you've told it to in your profile).
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Canopus Archives    says:

Canopus, if you also include the GPS co-ordinates in your EXIF data before uploading, flickr will automatically place them on the map...

I did consider that, but, I like to include Heading, Tilt and Range in my tags so that not only will Google Earth show the location, but, also the view. Hence I would need to include Geotag data in IPTC data so that Flickr could generate correct tags for Google Earth and encode coordinates in Exif data so that Flickr could place them on the Flickr Map automatically which seems a little too much work considering that Flickr can already read my Geotags and import them onto the map with the click of one button. If I wasn't going down the Google Earth route as well and just wanted photos to show on Flickr Maps I'd do it.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)

Craig Stanton says:

I'm surpirsed that no-one has mentioned Picasa yet. With Google's image tool and Google Earth you can eaily pick the exact spot the photo was taken and copy that into the Exif tags of your photo. You then upload the picture to Flickr and everything is dones (if you've turned on GPS Exif extraction that is). I like Flickrs geo-coding procedure as a web-based soltion, but doing it through Goole Earth is soooo much slicker.

What's missing though is downloaded images do not keep the GPS data in them. I get all the other Exif data back, but not the Exif. With devices such as Navman's iCN 750 able to give you directions to images that are correctly geo-coded it makes sense to put the GPS data into all the resized images that Flickr makes.
Posted 70 months ago. (permalink)