www.nickhodge.com

Nick Hodge, Flickr.com, Geot­agged: spent the greater part of today geot­ag­ging my images stored in Flickr. Geot­ag­ging is the addi­tion of spa­cial or geo­graph­ical metadata (that is: lat­it­ude and lon­git­ude) to my uploaded images. The four cam­eras I’ve used do not have GPS, so this geot­ag­ging caper is a manual post-processing effort.

The res­ol­u­tion of the Yahoo! Map Images for Sydney and Lon­don are excel­lent, the maps suck (unless you are in the US!). Even Tokyo’s map was strangely low res­ol­u­tion. At the time of writ­ing, 600,000 images have a geotag accord­ing to Flickr. Microsoft’s Local Live and Google’s Google Maps are way better.

Why invest the time?

Some­where, someday, someone is going to use this data to find out where someone was on a cer­tain day. Or, some smart soft­ware is going to cre­ate an inter­est­ing view of our world.
Time has been a part of the EXIF cam­era data for many years. These two dimen­sions are excel­lent for loc­at­ing on a simple 2D map, but do not give enough “res­ol­u­tion” to be for our Vir­tual Future. Apart from the height, the tar­get, tilt and head­ing would provide more data: Ima­gine a Second Life in a fully imaged, geot­agged, Microsoft PhotoSynth’d world. With the data out there in the cloud, we can live out our life in the vir­tu­al­ized clouds.
A most pleas­ant reason is to revisit your travels. Re-orienting your­self, remem­ber­ing the streets of Lon­don without the 28+ hour flight. Fun. Reliv­ing the past, vir­tu­ally. The future will be more out there and immersive.