earthalbum.com

I’ve been investigating adding geotagging search capabilities to this site, and I must say that at this point I’m unconvinced that it would add much depth. Actually, I’m convinced that it would make this site much worse.

Flickr only recently added the capability to geotag photos in a way that would allow you to search by, say, a (minlat,maxlat,minlong,maxlong) bounding-box; most photos currently geotagged on Flickr use a hacked-up tag convention (”geolong:78.5″,”geolat:43.2″) to record spatial information. Furthermore, most photos on Flickr are not geotagged using either the new method or the tag-convention method.

This has a few ramifications. First, if you really want to search for pictures via geotagging, you should create your own local geolong/geolat cache for all the Flickr photos that use the hacked-up tag convention so that you can search for the largest possible universe of photos. Again, this is because Flickr does not allow you to do a proximity search on photos that were tagged using the hacked-up tag convention. Creating a local longitude/latitude cache is possible, and what the World In Pictures does.

Secondly, though, and more importantly: if you want to try to limit your search to a certain geotagged bounding-box, you eliminate a massive percentage of many of the most interesting Flickr pictures. I think that what’s fun about earthalbum is how nice the pictures are. I can’t take any credit for that– credit really goes to the flickr interestingness crowdsourcing algorithms that allow me to sort the nicest pictures to the top of the pile. If I were to limit the searches to only the subset that were geotagged, earthalbum would be a very different experience. I know because I tried a version of a geotagged earthalbum on my development server, and the small number of pictures that came up were of substantially lower quality.

This is not to say that this will be the case forever. Someday, perhaps soon, built-in GPS will be a common feature of digital cameras, and location data will become a generally expected part of the metadata in digital photographs. When that day comes, I think that changing the search to one that is geotag-based rather than searchword-based will be a good idea. Until then, you can try www.flickr.com/map, which allows you to see all images currently geotagged in Flickr using Yahoo maps. Personally– and I know I’m biased– I find that site as it currently exists to be difficult to use and not particularly interesting.

In the meantime, I’m going to continue to pursue the idea of tag-based maps and see where that leads me.

As always, abouts and comments are welcome.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 14th, 2006 at 10:01 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.