Flickr getting a geography revamp
Flickr has 42 million photos with geotags--information called metadata that records the location where a photo was taken--and now it's trying to let users get more out of them.
At the Web 2.0 Summit on Friday, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield plans to demonstrate two new features, which are scheduled to debut in coming weeks. First is a revamped Flickr map page, an interface that lets people look at the photos taken at a specific location. Next is a new "places" feature that lets people explore specific geographic sites--a catalog of more than 70,000 so far.
For a look at the new pages, you can look at a gallery of Flickr screenshots we posted. And Yahoo itself is posting some information on the new feature.
The changes bring some refinement to the current world of geotagging, which is not for the faint of heart. (Though my experience has been a lot smoother once I got the time zone issue straightened out.)
Flickr's current map interface presents users with a map dotted with pink circles; a number in each circle indicates how many photos tagged with that location have been recently uploaded to Flickr. The new maps interface replaces those circles with the descriptive tags commonly used to label regional photos.
For example, some areas are likely to show tags with geographic descriptions such as "London." Others could get event-based tags that show a spurt in popularity, such as the San Francisco Bay to Breakers race, Butterfield said. Not too many words fit on a map of the world, but users can click a button to bring up a fresh supply.
"The current user interface is slow and confusing. People don't get the idea of a paging through photos in this kind of user interface," Butterfield said.
So far the tag interface appears at the global map level, but Flickr will gradually spread it to more local views, said Dan Catt, a Flickr engineer who works on the mapping technology.
The places pages offer a prepackaged view of thousands of locations. Clicking on a link on the maps page can take a user to the nearby place page, sifted to show the tag on which the user clicked. The page itself shows recent and interesting photos taken at the site, featured photographers who have photographed the region often, and popular and recent tags that lead to a new category of photos for that area.
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
- geo-tagable cameras?
- by Jonathan Machen October 19, 2007 12:34 PM PDT
- So if you haven't already posted this (have you?) it would be good
- Like this Reply to this comment
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- geotaggable cameras: don't hold your breath
- by Shankland October 19, 2007 3:03 PM PDT
- There are a very few cameras that are readily integrated with GPS systems. Among them are Nikon's higher-end SLRs--the D200 and D300 and the new D3. Canon's 1D Mark III, 1Ds Mark III and 40D SLRs can be fitted with a wireless control accessory that also has a GPS port.
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Processing -
(4 Comments)to know which cameras make it the easiest to share GPS
coordinates - for those of us about to upgrade..
However, the way most people perform geotagging is to carry a GPS while taking the photos and later add the location data to the photos by using software on a PC such as GPSPhotoLinker. Using that method, most cameras are as good as any others. If you want to tag raw images, you'll probably have better luck sticking with mainstream cameras given their proprietary file formats.