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...

related or relevant 09/07 to 11/07

- How to become a tagging master!
here

- How much is a 3d model worth?

Roger Rayle has used Google Earth to visualise (pall Gelam) Dioxane Levels/Plume maps and Aquifer locations, of note the system is used not just as a communication tool but also as a decision making system. The data is visualised over time providing a genuinely impressive implementation of the technology developed for the Society of Residents for Safe Water.

Rogers notes that a picture is worth 1000 words, a 3D model is equivalent to 10,000 words and if you add in the forth dimension of time its worth 1,000,000 words.

from here
or only 446 if you read this

- microsoft startup thingy
here

- outsource your brain?
here

- 3d film sequences
here

- Photophlow - worth a go?
here

- Flickr Slide Shows, nice...
here
- make 3d model from video
here

- collaborative geographic information?
here

- tags and everything in one place - a new service
here

- Attempted comment on Joi ito's blog...
here

- Pixel 3d maps - lush
here

- buy a house in virtual for homeless in real...
here

- Twinty - a.n.other new new thing?
here

- Flickr launches 'places' geodata to city/town names
here, and here

- Google Terrain (satelite now has show or hide overlay)
here

New alpha times two

Following some R&R for the last month and a half, the Quakr team have once more returned to work! Released today are two updated αlphα's.

Taggr - the tool to help you tag.
> Now supports GEO:ALT and GE:TILT tag.
> A simpler, clearer help and new look and feel.
> Links to the Viewr.

Viewr - the 3d photo view
> Compass on the ground instead of three lines
> Semi transparent images until selection
> No longer standard 'shabbatagging' - more images displayed in first view

All comments as welcome as ever...

related or relevant, 08/07

- geoblog post about 3d globes...
here

- google vs Ordinance Survey - there are no winners...
here

- Quakr went to the pub
here

- Viewr alph 0.32 = image info + date taken + tags
here

- A Viewr depiction of how to get from the station to my house...
here

- Quakr talk at UCL Brown Bag, 01.08.2007
here

-- more --

- topography on plates & "what it's like to walk up a hill discussed..."
here

- street view VS everyscape VS mapjack in YouTube form!
here

related or relevant, 07/07

- George Wolberg and something he calls Photo Sketch.
here, here, here and here

- we've make'd it!
here

- an important aside.
here

- Yahoo tiles get "better".
here and here

- Flickr 20 Million GeoTagged photos.
here

- Virtual Cogs - GPS + Camera + PSP screen?
here

-- more --

- A personal blimp (not wholly related...)
here

- Google starts a SketchUp blog...
here

- Google Campus 3D and other SketchUp content
here

- map the floods
here, here

- moblog - mobile blogging...
here

-- more --

- Flashr - a actionscript wrapper to the Flickr API
here

- Psynchr - used the above to make a timeline of images
here (I tried and failed to get two photosets into it... http://www.flickr.com/photos/katieportwin/sets/72157594490167134/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/hardbutnot/sets/72157600047520967/ -- hmmm)

- Flappr - entirely flash based flickr viewr...
here (it's a bit old...)

- Google Map blog post "A world built by its inhabitants"
here

- planning? pfflanning...
here

- pileus - an umbrella with lots of stuff...
here

- tech review of a new service - "the flickr 3d"
here

- flickrVision in 3d...
here

State of the OpenStreetMap (horse=yes again)

Thoroughly enjoyed OpenStreetMap's conference in Manchester yesterday.

For a start, it stopped raining for about an hour in the afternoon for the first time since I moved here.

Second, as a rambler, I am in love with . Nick takes take a weekly data dump from openstreetmap, adds a contour map from Nasa, and - best of all - allows annotations on the map, such as "this path is a bit scrambly" and (I envisage) "field on the left contains farmer with shotgun".

Third, I enjoyed seeing that London motorcycle courier timeline GPS traces thing again:


.. but was particularly interested to hear Steve's comment that it wasn't actually as useful as envisaged, since the GPS traces had no accompanying metadata. Hmm, a gratifying point for metadata geeks.

Fourth, Andy Robinson talked about tagging and standardisation. Openstreetmap suffer the same problem as Quakr - synonyms and homonyms, tag soup, emerging taxonomies not emerging in the way you expected - in short, the "horse=yes" problem. Like us, they don't want to impose a standard like GML or prevent users from typing freeform, but like us, want to make some use of tagging metadata and hence could use a little standardisation. Andy had a few suggestions, including:

1. Get people to reuse terms where possible, even if they aren't a perfect fit.
2. Have a Q&A style wiki to facilitate this.
3. Use definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary if in doubt.
4. Use namespaces - Andy is suggesting STAG_BASE: for things like rivers and fields, STAG_BUILT: for buildings, canals, etc, STAG_ADMIN: for road classifications etc.

Although I like namespaces and think they can work for tag data (geo:lat is pretty popular), I'm not completely convinced they'll solve the tag soup problem. Namespaces are good for saying what vocabulary you're using, or disambiguating two keys which belong in two domains, but did we really have two kinds of horse? It's definitely a good way of categorising things though.

And all power to Andy for tackling what to my mind is the most important and interesting problem facing anyone dealing with tagging metadata - that it's a Messy Mungy Business. (See what does 'tilt' mean, anyway?" )


Finally, you just can't beat artwork like this:



Enjoy!

Tiltometer featured on Make

Easy on the woodbines though Peter - we may be banned in California by next week.