24 Hours of Geotagged Photos

Probably best seen in HD and fullscreen, if your modem can take it.

So, here it is, 24 hours worth of geotagged photos (64,410) from last Monday, March 23rd. Our numbers say that around 30% are normally private, giving us a total of around 92,000 geotagged photos for that day, which is just over 1 photo geotagged per second.

All the data was pulled down (using Processing, of all things) via the API, and probably took around 12 minutes (when it's behaving itself) as I was being a) gentle with the servers b) was getting it as JSON which takes a while for Processing to parse each page (more information here: blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/processing-json-the-new-york-.... And then written to a flat file.

The code then goes on to read the file back in and render that above globe. Each frame represents 2 minutes, and so the first 720 frames == 24 hours, at ~30 frames per second == 24 seconds to display the whole day.

Because this is my first evar! attempt at Processing, I then went on to try a couple of stupid fancy tricks once all 64k 3D points are plotted. I figured that glowing globes was the "Hello World" of Processing, so as cliche as the final result is, I'm quite pleased with it ... developing it was equal parts fun and frustrating.

I'm sure I've gone around some things in an incredibly stupid way, but all the documentation for Processing says "Don't worry about how you get something to work, once it's working move on to the next thing" which is the kind of pragmatic philosophy I like.

Next I'll probably do a weeks worth of geotagged photos from London, The UK or USA.

Music is Funkylectro by Star Garden using a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.

Oh and Myles, why is the frame used to represent the video so grungy and not black?