I just started using the wonderful flickrapi Python interface for, well, searching Flickr for geocoded photos around given locations. It’s fairly easy to use and does most things for you. You start with a Flickr API object…
The map development team at Flickr released some interesting new additions to their geo API: shapes – not yet real ESRI Shapefiles, even though they’re on their way (see code.flickr for more information on that).
Flickr shapes are, as I understand it, polygons of aggregated point clouds of photo locations sharing the same location name. For geotagging, Flickr uses a very smart method: once the user has placed a photo on the map, the system sets a place name next to the photo. At the same time Flickr offers name modifications if the user isn’t happy with the proposed name. A list of name alternatives shows up where the user can pick the one which sounds best. That way Flickr constantly receives user feedback on its geodata and can continuously refine its geoname system.
On the other end Flickr makes the collected data through its API available again (see flickr.places.getInfo). I queried Vienna and some neighborhoods to see what the shapes look like in the city I know best. Surprisingly the city boundary is more accurate than I’d have thought. Keep in mind that it’s just the result of people geotagging photos and not surveying an administrative border.
The red line is the Flickr shape, the white line is the city boundary in Google Earth.
To obtain proper Flickr shapes on smaller neighborhoods, a certain critical mass of geotags needs to be achieved. Especially tourist hotpots turn out to be a potential pitfall: there is a high share of users geotagging without good local knowledge. Locals, who usually know the area better, won’t move around tourist attractions and take pictures that much. The relatively small amount of more accurate geotags done by locals will vanish in the mass of inaccurate geotags.
The yellow shape is Stephansdom, probably mostly tagged by thousands of tourists. Although Stephansdom is supposed to be the city center, it’s still only a square around a church within the neighborhood Innere Stadt, the green shape. As the picture shows, the relation and location of both shapes is slightly shifted.
I think some sort of ranking mechanisms can help here – a proper method to determine how accurate and trustworthy a name and corresponding geotag are.
Anyways, the idea of crowdsourced geonames on Flickr is interesting and it’s generally fascinating to watch the development a photo gallery has gone through over the last years. [via geobloggers]
I don’t understand why so many people complain about the recently introduced video feature on Flickr.
90sec won’t turn Flickr into another YouTube – Flickr already haz cat photos btw – but 90sec allow users to create interesting versions of their static images.
I’m looking forward seeing more long photos on Flickr!
User generated content means users care what happens to their content. They even might act like shareholders and want a vote or at least share their opinion. It’s a totally interesting aspect in business decision making processes – asking the crowd before the board.
I personally don’t care if Yahoo! is taken over by Microsoft or not. If the service is good and works for me, I use it, no matter what label is on it. [via Max]
Maybe it’s just me, but I think the continent spanning words (tags) on the new Flickr map are a step backwards regarding usability, compared to the really nicely done photo-dots-generalization the previous version of the map had. The only interactivity on the new map is clicking tags, right? Or did I miss something? I really preferred the old version where I could zoom down to photo-dots and browse through photos directly on the location.
Well, it must be my dot-fetish, but on the new user maps the generalized dots are gone too. Now you see the most recent (or interesting) photographs placed on the map, which is just another exploring approach. If you scroll through the pictures on the bar, the map changes too, unfortunately not vice versa. When you pan the map, the photos aren’t updated in the bar. Would be something nice to have too.
Whereas the new Places feature is awesome. One page per place, containing excellently chosen photographs, active groups and people on that location. Very well done. Even though I wish I could navigate to other places more easily. With some interactivity on the small map or links to popular neighboring places for instance. Currently I have to go up and down in regional hierarchy or use the location search.
Tupalo, my favorite socialyellowpagesthing, recently added Flickr integration. Just like as known from Upcoming or a couple of other sites, you can now use Flickr-tags to assign your photos to a particular spot on Tupalo.
It’s pretty simple: copy and paste the tag provided on every Tupalo spot-page to your Flickr photo tags. I guess Tupalo will crawl Flickr in given intervals to find newly-tagged images. Mine were found and showed up on Tupalo within a few minutes.
Tupalo tags follow the de-facto machine tag standard on Flickr and look like tupalo:spot=316, whereas 316 is the spot id in that case.
I’m a person who loves photos, but generally speaking, I think it’s is a great addition to Tupalo. What’s better than visual impressions of a spot you’re reading reviews about?
Even though there are now more images on the site, the new feature doesn’t interfere with the clean – white space forever! – user interface at all. In fact, Tupalo is one of the few sites my boss could immediately deal with, and this means something like olympic gold for usability. It seems like every button, link or information is where it should be on this site.
It took a TechCrunch post to direct my attention to Picnik, an amazing online photo editor. Among other photo services, it already integrates very well with Flickr using the Flickr authentication API. You can retrieve from Flickr, edit in Picnik and save back to Flickr seamlessly. Apparently the Flickr user interface will get another button soon to make the editing process with Picnik even more easier.
My first thought was that I won’t need iPhoto anymore. Ever since I bought the DSLR I only use iPhoto to manage the snapshots I take with my smaller camera. If I’m going to upload directly from my smaller camera to Flickr and do rudimentary editing like cropping and basic color adjustments there in Picnik, which does an excellent job as I found out last weekend, I could skip iPhoto entirely. The Flickr-Picnik workflow should work at least as good as the workflow in iPhoto.
Technically no problem but there would still be this unpleasant feeling in my stomach region of giving the control over my images totally out of my hands. Stomach says no, so I rather stay some more time with the local iPhoto library as primary library and the Flickr account as secondary “fun” library.
However, Picnik will be a great addition to Flickr and I’m pretty looking forward to it!
