Sep 1, 2006
More thoughts on Flickr’s Geotagging feature
So, I’ve been geotagging things on Flickr for a few days now, and I think that +/-90% of my images now have some sort of location attached to them. I’m impressed and excited about how quickly it’s been adopted by the community. But in the process of doing this, I’ve discovered that it doesn’t do something I want – or rather, does something a little too well.
Basically, it’s too specific. I want to be able to be general – or at least less narrow – when geotagging images. Now, I know that’s not really the point of geotagging. In theory, the service means you can say to the closest metre where a particular image was taken. The trouble is, in practice, I can’t do that, because I often don’t know, exactly.
To be clear, this request doesn’t come out of wanting to be private and secretive about locations. I know that you can set the privacy of the location data, but this doesn’t really help when the act of geotagging itself requires attachment to the smallest possible unit of measurement: a specific, identifiable location: a pinpoint on a map.
You know how, in Flickr, you can change the date a photo was taken on, to be specific (13 April 1978), a little wider (April 1978) or fairly general (sometime in 1978)? That’s the sort of layering I want to be able to apply with my geotags.
See, for example, I know that this photo was taken in the top back corner of Somerset House, and I’m happy to tag it that way:
But this one, I took at the weekend somewhere on a back road on the border between Shropshire and Wales.
I’d love to be able to say “somewhere in Shropshire” or even “somewhere in this general area”. I could even pinpoint it down to an area of a square mile or so, but the crapness of the Yahoo maps, (and the crapness of the map I was using to navigate at the time) combines with the requirement for absolute specificity means that it’s ended up being tagged as Montgomery. But I know that it wasn’t taken there. And now you do, too.
Thoughts about how to get around this? Aside from hoping Flickr modify the geotagging requirements a bit?
Oh, one other thing: it’d be great if all those location tags I’ve laboriously added in the past could be picked up and used within the mapping interface….
I haven’t played with this yet – waiting for the decent Yahoo maps to arrive – but this is from the introductory blog post:
“You can drag anywhere onto the map – a degree of “accuracy” is inferred by your current zoom level, so if you just want to show the city or general area a photo was taken, you can drag them on at a medium zoom level and those photos won’t show up in odd places for people zoomed right down to street level.”
http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/2006/08/great_shot_wher.html
I believe that Flickr Maps does a quite good jobb for your request. When you geolocate your photos without zooming, so without knowing (or not being interested) in the exact location, like for example “somewhere inShropshire”, later your photo will not be shown when people browse the map in a zoom level under the one you used to locate it. Your photo only will be shown in the zoom level you used and above, because actually the photo has not exact location and this exact location has not been indicated, it will make no sense and confuse to show it in a close zoom level.
True, the photo says is “taken in Montgomery, Wales” but this is not the tag, it’s just an indication. The map itself and its behaviour is the tagging system, so I believe it’s quite ok for what you are asking for.
Hope I explained my self clearly,
Eduardo
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