Flickr considers all given search arguments together, including location criteria such as bbox and accuracy, and returns the best matching photos based on some Yahoo! search voodoo.
It’s as I expected it to be.
The problem why I didn’t get any results while writing this previous post was that there was obviously something wrong at the api.flickr.com servers. It led me to the “Flickr searches solely within the bbox” theory, which is wrong. Flickr searches clever!
See yourself:
This link should return a few (~ 30) photos taken or geotagged in the center of Vienna within an area of 600x600m and an accuracy below city to street level.
Sometimes it works, sometimes not, only Yahoo! voodoo spirits know why…
This afternoon I found the time to try Flickr’s new geo API services. Well, the only thing I did was to add a 600x600m bbox around each underground station point to the existing text search string on my little test site.
Some notes on that:
Flickr doesn’t use the bbox as an additional “OR” filter condition but takes the bbox as an “AND” argument into account, meaning that Flickr searches solely within the bbox for the text search string. With little success, since the majority of photos isn’t geotagged the Flickr search returns only a few results (compared to the text search). Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s what I observed.
I expected the location tag to count as bonus point in the “relevance” ranking if the place name of the photo matches the search string or the photo lies within the bbox.
As a workaround to see more results I’m checking if it makes sense to do a location search around my station. If necessary I strip the bbox condition out of my search arguments and switch to the traditional text search.
Including the location argument is not as straightforward as I thought. It’s easy to implement of course, but the results are not very satisfying.
Anyhow, I’m confident that the results will improve soon since more and more people are starting to geotag their photos on Flickr.
One problem in my region is that one cannot geotag photos based on Yahoo! maps, they’re still to coarse. Loc.alize.us is the better option to get that job done here.
Sometimes I wasn’t getting any search result based on the bbox, strange, maybe there was something wrong at the Flickr servers because loc.alize.us wasn’t displaying any photo either. I’ll keep an eye on that…
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!
If you call a GPS device your own, live in the area of Vienna and enjoy discovering your neighborhood from a new perspective then you should have a look at 4816:
the intersection of the minutes
4816 is about finding the minute points on the GPS grid in the urban area of Vienna. The point N48° 11,000´ E16° 19,000 is an example of these 185 intersections of latitudinal and longitudinal minutes within Vienna. … At each intercept point a photo is taken in each compass direction.
By traversing the GPS intercept points you take a journey through Vienna. The goal is known. But what will be the nature of its environment? Will it be approachable? What will be the special thing about it?
Kick-off is this thursday night (8/31/2006) at the FLUC in Vienna.
To get a picture of how far this project can get, I marked the minute intersections in and around Vienna in a Google Map.
Looking at certain markers on the satellite image I started thinking about methods to stabilize a little boat in the middle of the danube, precisely at N48°16′ E16°22′, for the time necessary to take a picture in each compass direction. Any ideas?
At locations like N48°15′ E16°22′ you should be quick and better have a copy of the railway schedule in your pocket if you don’t want to be run over by a train.
Well, before trying this two points I should check if all my insurance fees are paid.
Still fun and less dangerous will be explaining to people why I it is so important to enter their garden and make 4 pictures at this magic location.
I think Don Cooke would love this project.
Update
I have now a GPX-file and a KML-file for Google Earth available which show only the minute intersections within the boundaries of Vienna. Since my Google Map parses the same GPX-file, it got updated too.
Never ever try accessing Flugfeld Aspern from the southern side.
Today I wanted to get to the old runways, I’ve never been there before and I know this area only from above, from maps, development plans and Google Earth. From above things appear easier than they actually are. A rectangular settlement and street structure is supposed to be easy for orientation and mind maps. Very misleading and probably the reason why I left the map at home because it’s seems so easy to go there.
No way! I simply couldn’t find a way to the old rollways. All the fences and hedges in this area destroy any sense for direction. At a certain point I even found myself going in circles!
Maybe I should’ve placed a waypoint on my GPS before I left for Flugfeld Aspern.
However, next time I’ll try from the northern side, put the map in my bag and mark some spots on the GPS before leaving.
See the track, including some photos, here.
Browsing thru my Flickr contacts today I came across this blog post:
Zooomr is up again…
… What they did do was expand on the stuff I’m completely uninterested in, like GeoTagging. …
Shocking! Somebody who isn’t excited about geotechnology!
Seriously, this post made me think about the ongoing hype around recent geotechnology. I’m referring to the “mashup industry” as synonym for geotechnology intruding entertainment. Let’s stick with geotagging: the only people I can see who are geotagging their photos right now are geeks, early adopting geo geeks. Of course everyone is stunned by tools like Google Earth, but no one of my “normal” friends is even asking for loading photos into Google Earth and view them on the globe. They just want to watch the pictures like my parents already did with their old photo albums,.
Geotechnology as part of the entertainment industry is unlikely going to be the “next big thing”.
I think there are good chances that technologies like geotagging will sneak silently into our day-to-day life. It definitely will be a handy feature, even for non geo geeks like my aunt, if you have a button next to the picture in your photo organizer which tells you the place or shows a map where the picture was taken. But first the demand for this button must be created. Why would I need a digital map in addition to the photo when I have my mental map know exactly where the picture was taken?
I don’t own a mobile phone because I needed one. I wanted a mobile phone because somebody told me that I want it. And now I can’t imagine how my life worked without mobile phone.
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!