Flickr’s famous mugshot collector Least Wanted made it from his Flickr photo stream to a photo exhibition and publication of a photo book. Congratulations!
Least Wanted is still one of the most interesting photo streams you can find on Flickr!
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Tag Archive for 'Flickr'
Page 4 of 5
Just a day after introducing the new geotagging feature, the Flickr team has released the Flickr Geo API.
It’s simple but powerfull: just add parameters like bbox or accuracy to the flickr.photos.search method and filter any search by location. See the Flickr API documentation for a detailed description of this and other new additions.
Btw, Steward Butterfield has a few quite impressing numbers in his last post about the successful launch of the new Flickr feature…
Update
Flickr can read automatically the EXIF location information of your photos, but you have to enable this feature first. Do it here!
What I really do appreciate about Mashups is the speed of development. Very quickly you get from the first thought of an idea or feature to a point, where you can see your first results.
From time to time, mostly motivated while reading a technology post, I can’t avoid to start playing around with this kind of “quick and dirty” development tools by myself.
So, a few months ago I wanted to try the AJAX capabilities of the Google Maps API and started making this little map of the underground stations in Vienna. Basically I just let JavaScript and the API parse an XML file and overlay the result in a Google Map. To decorate the points in the map, I added a photo from Flickr for each station and linked to a Flickr photo search to see more pictures about this station and the area around.
Two days ago I read a post about FlickrStorm, a new Flickr photo search with some “magic” (whatever that means) from a future Google employee. However, reading the post it came to my mind to link my map to FlickrStorm instead of the Flickr search. Unfortunately FlickrStorm doesn’t allow access from outside, meaning that you can’t simply access FlickrStorm by calling the search with an expression like “/?q=searchterm”.
Once the idea of improving my photo search of the underground map in my head, I started trying a few alternative ways – loaded some AJAX libraries, did some testing and finally got a photo search running I’m satisfied with.
Go figure! I really think it’s a nice map add-on.
At least I had my fun hoping from station to station in the map and browsing thru the photos that showed up in the search box. It’s kind of exploring the city by subway on the internet. Flickr has in the meantime become such an amazing photo archive. I even discovered some corners I’ve never seen before around some subway stations, have to open my eyes better next time I pass by…
Flickr reads out IPTC place information and automatically tags your pictures with it. Tools like GPS Photo Linker allow you, based on given GPS tracks, to add coordinates, elevation and IPTC place information to your photo. I figured this out after I geotagged and uploaded the pictures of our last weekend trip. Nice feature!
Maybe I’m completely wrong but is it possible that after upgrading to Mac OS 10.4.7 my Wi-Fi (Airport) is not working properly anymore?
Last week I ran into problems while uploading some picture to Flickr. Once the process was completed all of my uploaded images were full of weird distortions like colored stripes, shifted image parts or just where half grey. Nothing helped: I tried to reduce image size, changed the image format and uploaded them with different tools (iPhoto plugin, browser and uploadr), no luck.
Finally I emailed the Flickr support team (which is very responsive!) and they told me that it seems to be a connection issue where the end of my uploaded image is being truncated due to slow connections.
So I did 2 more tests, hoping that I’m able to track down the problem:
- upload by email – success, no image distortions
- shut down airport and connect via a good old cable to the router – success, no image distortions
and a final 3rd one:
- turn on airport and unplug the cable – failure, broken image online
Conclusio
I’m no network specialist nor do I know too many details about how Mac OS X works inside. But I do know that after I upgraded to Mac OS 10.4.7 I wasn’t any longer able to successfully upload my images up to Flickr.
It’s annoying, that’s all. It’s not a crucial issue as long as it only affects image upload to Flickr (even if it bothers me a lot that I’m not able to upload and participate easily on Flickr… hmm… maybe I should talk to someone professional why some Flickr-abstinence makes me nervous, but that’s probably another story…).
MacFixIt has already a collection of workarounds for many (!) issues caused by 10.4.7, but apparently not for my little Airport problem. Basically is my MacBook’s Airport working, except this annoying truncated image upload problem (and I’m not thinking of reseting all my favorite/recent networks because of that bug!).
Update #1
I was wrong, this bug isn’t the result of 10.4.7. A MacBook running 10.4.6 had the same problem with the picture upload to Flickr. It must be a malfuntion of my router (Netgear WGT624 v3). I doubt it’s an Airport problem because I was able to successfully upload images logged into other Wi-Fi’s…
Flickr just got an update on its user interface. There is a new navigation bar, organizr (no Flash anymore!) and a new structure of your photo and group sites. My first impression is that you now get easier and faster to most features, especially the new organizr seems to be a HUGE improvement! Great work!
For an iPhoto plugin I couldn’t live without is now an update available: FlickrExport Beta 1.3.4 (via TUAW)
As spring took its time to arrive in Austria and the unfriendly weather forced me to stay at home I started playing around with the Google Maps API again. A few weeks ago I saw those nice underground maps for London and Madrid and thought that I’ll create one for Vienna.
All the necessary information like positions, line numbers, station names, etc. are stored within a XML file which I can access by JavaScript and overlay it to my Google Map. Of course it would be possible to pull all that information out of a database too, but for about 40 stations it would rather be an overkill than useful. I thought about extending the map by tramway and bus stations. Then a database solution would make sense as you’ll probably get a few thousand stations to manage.
Additionally I put links to Flickr to the stations, all stored in my XML file. If I found a station relevant photo on Flickr it’ll display within the information bubble directly on the map. A link to Flickr search gives you the photos which contain “Vienna station name“. If you have a photo on Flickr of a certain viennese underground station, just add the appropriate station name and Vienna to its tags, title or description and it’ll be found by this search string. To narrow the results it would be great to have an underground station specific tag like subway or underground.
I think it’s a nice feature. If you don’t know the place you get an image what it looks like, or what the station looks like. Underground photos can be really interesting, frankly, I somehow like them. Once position information is an EXIF tag by default all this search-by-name will be redundant and some strange robots will automatically map your holiday photos. But till then, human beings have to apply names to places.
The points (“U”) in the map only represent the “center” of the station. I didn’t map every single exit. That would be something for my ToDo list.
All in all it isn’t a big deal but I think it’s nice example for testing and learning webmapping APIs. Once ArcWeb SVG Viewer offers some detailed data for my region I’ll probably apply this map for their API. Actually I’m pretty looking forward to try their JavaScript/SVG thing.
Update #1:
More details about Vienna’s underground network you find at UrbanRail.net.
Update #4:
Improved photo search.
Amazing how people can let time stand still while living in the same hectic world as we do. Even though this photoset on Flickr made me somehow recall the movie Kingpin.
For anybody interested in streetart (like stencils, stickers, etc.): I made the ongoing streetart exhibition “Streetart – The Readable City” available through Google Earth. Actually only the outdoor part is available in Google Earth (indoor it wouldn’t make sense, lack of GE’s accuracy, once Galileo is operating we can talk about mapping pictures inside of galleries). The outdoor part is a short walk through the 7th district of Vienna, along some streetart works. I did this walk with a turned on GPS, so that I could later at home geocode my photos and load them into Google Earth. That probably sounds pretty geeky, but I ensure you that I’m going for walks without the GPS device as well. Sometimes. However, playing around with Google Earth, GPS and Flickr was fun and I got a nice photo set with clean GPS EXIF entries.
Here you find the Network link for Google Earth.
On Flickr I put a few more pics from the indoor part too. It’s a free exhibition and I guess it was allowed to take pictures, at least nobody complained so far. If somebody feels like his intellectual property is violated by publishing this photos online please let me know.
Streetart
Die lesbare Stadt
11.2 – 20.3.06
Freiraum / quartier21
MuseumsQuartier
Wien Museumsplatz 1
1070 Wien
Have a look at the official website of the exhibition.