Quakr - done by the big boys

So, some 3 years after we started this here Quakr thing, Google Maps and MS Bing have taken our idea and 'done it'. With their respective street view bubbles and geotagged photos from flickr, Picasa and Panoramio, they have machine managed them into 'place'. Exactly as we imagined all those moons ago, only with bigger resources than we were ever able to muster in our spare time. Perhaps we should have really gone for it and quit our proper jobs and then been bought out by them thar big boys, but perhaps we've had our fun and we should focus on doing something new...

Bing with street images.
Geoblogger talks about Gmap's thing.
Oxford's Carfax Tower with pictures machined into place.

ps - If it doesn't kill you it makes you stronger. And if it kills you you're dead and don't care anyways. So get on with it.

google does us over

Your pictures and views thereof : http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/07/zoom-photo-navigation-in-street-view.html

Timeline : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOR0fPTx-os
Zoom, Tilt, Rotate : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3ytS7fHJf0

Actually, it's not quite all dead for us... we're still in a different focus space from Google - they show maps with the occasional photo, we want(ed) to show photo's with the occasional map tile for context.

Not a winge, honest

from here.

I've been attempting to use sort with machine tags in the same photos.search api. Seems the sort is working to date level ONLY, even though the original photos are timestamped. I suppose I could attempt to sort inside my application, but ... is this a known bug / is there a workaround?

to reproduce, go to www.flickr.com/services/api/explore/
user id = 85097477@N00
tags = walkhome
sort = date-taken-asc
machine tags = geo:lat=, geo:lon=, geo:dir=
machine tag mode = any
extras = date_taken

first three results:
<photo id="978048548" owner="85097477@N00" secret="ad5dcdb8d5" server="1259" farm="2" title="DSC00289" ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" datetaken="2007-08-01 17:59:32" datetakengranularity="0"/>
<photo id="977179253" owner="85097477@N00" secret="011da408b7" server="1416" farm="2" title="DSC00285" ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" datetaken="2007-08-01 17:57:06" datetakengranularity="0"/>
<photo id="978039486" owner="85097477@N00" secret="df95c760e9" server="1270" farm="2" title="DSC00286" ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" datetaken="2007-08-01 17:58:02" datetakengranularity="0"/>

remove the machine tag bits and the first three results are correctly...
<photo id="978031002" owner="85097477@N00" secret="4a3bd3f881" server="1253" farm="2" title="DSC00283" ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" datetaken="2007-08-01 17:55:29" datetakengranularity="0"/>
<photo id="977176661" owner="85097477@N00" secret="3c646cda47" server="1346" farm="2" title="DSC00284" ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" datetaken="2007-08-01 17:56:24" datetakengranularity="0"/>
<photo id="977179253" owner="85097477@N00" secret="011da408b7" server="1416" farm="2" title="DSC00285" ispublic="1" isfriend="0" isfamily="0" datetaken="2007-08-01 17:57:06" datetakengranularity="0"/>

Meanwhile, I'm sure you've noticed some changes.... http://www.quakr.co.uk got itself a new logo! The Taggr has been updated to match and now has the quakr:zoom tag added. The Viewr is muchosly updated now at alpha 0.40 which must be some kind of milestone. The most recent additions have been a 'World Move' slider which loads into the world view more tiles and images, and a 'play' button which should auto-move the camera across the loaded image set. [due to the above flickr API bug however, it's not quite as perfect as it should be!].

All comments as ever most welcome. There's still a pile of things in our heads which will be rendered into the software in the coming months.

What's the point of your photos?

Go on! Give your photos a point! It's not hard and it'll make them far more useful and interesting to view.

Currently there are a large number of mapped photos in flickr
- More than 30,320,000 are geotagged... but ...
- 8,215 have a geo:dir
- 3,419 have a ge:head/ge:heading
- 26 have a kml:heading
- 10 have a geo:heading
- 0 have a kml:dir, quakr:compass or exif:GPSImgDirection (at least that's what the searchers tells me)

That's such a huge minority, we decided to make it all easier for you...

As of α0.38, the Quakr Viewr now supports point!

simply add
point=[[north, northnortheast, northeast, eastnortheast, east, eastsoutheast, southeast, southsoutheast, south, southsouthwest, southwest, westsouthwest, west, westnorthwest, northwest, northnorthwest]] or
point=[[n, nne, ne, ene, e, ese, se, sse, s, ssw, sw, wsw, w, wnw, nw, nnw]] or
point=[[0...359]]
and the greasemonkey flickr script will understand and add the link to the Viewr to your Flickr image page and we'll include your images in the generated world.

See http://www.flickr.com/photos/hardbutnot/1534749879/in/set-72157602245100210/
as a simple example from flickr ... and in the viewr here.

Comments as ever welcome...

Quietly working away

Following a hectic June which included moving house, Glastonbury, some photos and our speaking engagement at the Where 2.0 conference, we've been mostly a bit quiet.

However...
*) Due to popular request we've updated the Taggr application to include the newly updated Google Map satellite imagery.
*) We are currently working "hard" on getting some more functionality into the Viewr.
*) We've done some testing on the relatively newly released Sandy v1.2 and it looks oddly slower, but we'll discuss and sort that soon I suspect.
*) Now that the Flickr Query problem we uncovered has been fixed, the whole Viewr experience is much speedier. We're now able to subset the GEO data we get from Flickr to only include those with the minimum tag set on the first query rather than having to mess with the whole pile ourselves.

Quakr Taggr Tool : geo:lat, geo:long, geo:dir

I'm working on a tool create geo⁺ metadata, post-hoc.

Version 0.1 of QuakrTaggr supports:

* latitude + longitude
* direction (compass)

By "⁺" I mean I want geo:lat/geo:long plus direction, tilt, altitude, etc - ideally, the Quakr 7D set. By "post hoc", I mean a tool like like Flickr Map / GmIF which you use when you get home, rather than an attachment for your camera.

I am resorting to post-hoc metadata capture over wielding a tiltometer because:
1. My GPS is insufficiently accurate in towns.
2. Many of the bits of the tiltometer have fallen off, leaving me with .. well, a sticky camera..

Version 0.1 is based on GMaps API (of course). I had a hard time geocoding UK postcodes - big up to tomanthony. Plans for Version 0.2: greasemonkey altitude (earthtools?)

http://taggr.quakr.co.uk/

7D twisting and tagging

I've been thinking about the terms we should use to machine tag our 7d tiltometer metadata.

The terms:

1. Altitude
2. Latitude
3. Longitude
4. Compass bearing
5. Tilt
6. Orientation
7. Timestamp

Some semantics:

By tilt, we mean rotation around X axis - or, are we pointing the camera at our feet?


By orientation, we mean rotation around Z axis - or, are we doing a wacky half-portrait half-landscape shot?


By compass bearing, we mean rotation around Y axis. North, East, North-North-East. Oh, you know what a compass looks like..



OK, I've got two aims:

A. Use the semantically correct term.
B. Use whatever everyone else is using - accept existing data.

Since we're hoping to make use of user-contributed photo metadata other than that we've cooked up ourselves, B. is really important to us.


altitude, latitude, longitude -> geo:

Ok, these first 3 are a no-brainer on both criteria: geo: is the preferred ns prefix for the swig Basic Geo (WGS84 lat/long) Vocabulary. And, thousands of taggers already voted with their fingers:

compass bearing, tilt -> ge:

Google Earth / KML / FlickrFly offer ge:tilt (meaning the same as we do), and ge:heading (meaning compass bearing).

The use of 'ge' seems a bit unsatisfactory to me. 'G'oogle 'E'arth describes the application, not the data. But ho hum, 9268 people don't agree:



, so that's a decider for me.

We are also stuck with the problem that FlickrFly have been recommending 'head', while the kml vocab defines 'heading'. 'Head' is the statistical winner. But perhaps we should double-tag and use both?


Orientation -> exif ?

ge:rotation doesn't quite capture our meaning. Strictly, exif:orientation's value should be restricted to 4 possible positions. But, it does have that usability factor - it's meaning is understandable.. so I think we'll cheat and use it anyway for now.


timestamp -> dc: / exif: ?

This is a tricky one. What do people actually do? Well.. mainly nobody tags this at all - this data belongs in the EXIF pile that your camera puts there for free.




Given that.. I'm tempted to go with exif on the basis that it's more familiar to amateur photographers, and thus easier to type in the box. (and persuade others to type in the box..?)

Really, we're trying to squeeze an exif-shaped datum into a tag-shaped hole on this one. Perhaps we should be querying the exif data instead?..



Provisional quakr set:

1.geo:alt
2.geo:lat
3.geo:long
4.ge:heading
5.ge:tilt
6.exif:orientation
7.exif:dateTime

Geotagging

Our data gathering trip with the 7D tiltometer produced much smirking and several notebook pages of metadata. We went home, warmed up (eventually), and uploaded the photos to flickr (see the set here).

Next... load the data

The question of how to represent all the tilt/heading/shoesize data in triple tags/machine tags is a big one - I'll leave it to Katie to deal with that later ;)
For the time being I'll just take you through the basic geotagging process.

Step 1: Decimalise the data

Our GPS device gave lat/long data in degrees and minutes like this:



What you are seeing there is data in degrees and minutes. I guess it made sense to somebody once, and there are probably important nautical reasons why you wouldn't want a decimal figure. Hmmm.

Either way, it's still no good for us - we need decimal values.

So, from 51°44.915 do the following:
1. Take the 44.915 (the minutes value - which is actually decimal already in our case)
2. Divide it by 60 (44.915/60 = 0.748583)
3. Add this on to the 51 (the degrees value)
4. 51 + 0.748583 = 51.748583

And that's it!

If your device gives you degrees, minutes and seconds, follow the full conversion instructions on wikipedia.

Step 2: Enter the data into flickr

The flickr map does allow you to drop photos directly onto the map but we have our own location data (that's the whole point), so...
I just went through each of the photos on flickr clicking on 'Add a tag'. For each photo I entered something like:

geotagged
geo:lon=-1.25691667
geo:long=-1.25691667
geo:lat=51.75406667

(more on lon vs long in later posts!)

Step 3: Import into the flickr map

This isn't crucial to anything we are doing at quakr, but we were eager to see where our photos would end up. To do this go here: http://flickr.com/account/geo/import.
Follow the instructions and you should get the message

"OK! Your import request has been placed in a queue. It shouldn't take too long to complete"

Step 4: Check the map!

I tagged all of our photos with quakr, and doing a map search for 'quakr' brings up something very pleasing...



And that's it for the basic lat/long data. Happy geotagging!