Brian Zhang Larsen’s Blog

I more or less just finished my Flickr Fetchr application, that allows you to dowload photos in full size from flickr. It is written in C# and extends the FlickrNet API Library. Get it here.

Yesterday Lei and I went to Lejre Experimental Center, Near Roskilde. It is an open air museum, with reconstructions of ancient living, stretching from the early stone age to the early 19th century, mainly with focus on the Iron Age. I really like these open air museums, because they tend to have very authentic nature, and combined with good weather and beef sandwiches with garlic butter, it is a winning combination.

I been there once, 20 year ago, and I have wanted to go back for a long time. There is something really fascinating about the Iron and Viking age history, especially for a kid like me, who grew up in the Roskilde area where the local history from this era is rich.

Anyway, we took a bunch of pictures, and geotagged most of them. I still use the “old” style Google map geotagging with visible geotags, partly because otherwise I had to rewrite my own Image fetching script, and partly because Google maps still tends to be much more detailed. You can see the geotagged pictures in the map section, or all of them on flickr.

Finally Flickr implemented a feature that has been long in development; the ability to geotag, while not having to use third party tools. Ever since Dan Catt from geobloggers.com got hired by the Flickr empire, geotaggers have been holding their breath (actually far from it, since new cool tools and applications appear weekly). But now it finally got revealed. Not surprisingly they use yahoo maps, which is kind of crappy outside the US, so third party googlemaps integrations will most likely still be popular for a while. But there is no doubt that this is the right step to go for Flickr.

Maybe this is also an incentive for yahoo maps to do something about their lack of detail, and do an upgrade like skynet (read google) just did recently in Europe.

For all of us who already had a lot of geotagged photos, they made a cool but necessary import feature, which automatically imports all the geotagged photos, to the map. The location data also has various levels of privacy, so not everyone is necessarily allowed to watch the location of every picture. The tags itself are, as far as I can see hidden but now a text appear above the EXIF data, about the location of the photo, and a link to a popup map. For me this is a great thing, and I hope many more will get on with the geotagging for no greater purpose than make to holyday photos a little more interesting. The only thing i am worrying a bit about is the risk that geotagging, using yahoo will lead to very unprecise tags. Since almost no roads, other than the major highways are represented outside US, it could be very hard to tag precise locations. Panasonic >> the next time I by a lumix, it better be with GPS!!

Although, the information about the location is a very nice feature, it is actually wrong on this picture. Victoria, Hong Kong Island, is south of the strait on the picture. The picture was taken in Kowloon, Hong Kong.

Look at my flickr map here, or view my still more detailed googlemap implementation here.

I have been longing for GPS integration in cameras for a long time. I thought that there would be many possibilities with this feature such as integration with Google maps, or Google earth or various other things. And then recently I found that some people allready where tagging there photos with GPS coordinates, exactly for the purpose of doing these cool integrations as I had been longing for.

High on life I started to investigate how the easy way to do this was, and I quickly found this cool web application for the purpose of tagging ones flickr photos. Afterwards they can be viewed in the self same application, or via google earth. It seems like this is quite a new trend (a year or so), and different people are developing new ways of watching and tagging all these photos, all the time. Some nice ways of watching is via this google earth network link (kml file), or via maps.yuan.cc. You can see my pictures which I geotagged here, or by searching in the previous mentioned applications.

For now the links between these applications are only hold by private users. But maybe someday in the near future there will be a yahoo or/and google funded connection between them. That way it would be more credible, and attractive for the masses. The tagging procedure at the moment is quite timeconsuming. So the best thing would surely be GPS in the camera.

The next thing I want is pitch, roll and yaw in the tag. But it will take me some time to determine these angles, and at the moment I am not sure what to use it for. I AM sure though, that it will prove itself useful somehow.

- – Update 2005-05-02 – -

I have made a small map application, thanks to the google map api. The map shows my geotagged images from flickr. It still has some issues in IE, but in firefox it is pretty ok. Check it.