There's a lot of buzz today about flickrvision.com - a website that claims to display realtime geotagged Flickr pictures on a Google world map.It's a cool idea and it's certainly entertaining but right now seems flawed
1) The realtime bit is overplayed. There is no relation between the date/time a picture is taken and when it is uploaded and when it is geotagged
2) From watching Flickrvision for maybe 30 minutes I spotted many anomalies whihc make me doubt the alleged geotagging. Examples:
when I clicked on several of the Flickrvision displayed pix to see the original photopage on Flickr, I don't see location information. Some of the posters have other geotagged photos, some don't have any geotagged photos.Palm trees in Belgium, amazing seafront scenes in Minsk, Far Eastern waterfront scenes in London....
Photos from www.flickr.com/photos/visuellegedanken/ for instance , none of which seem to be geotagged
There was one photo of the Eiffel Tower from Milwaukee and another from Omaha
Arc de Triomphe in Germany?
An unusually large number of photos from Minsk, Belarus including dramatic seashores, many signs in English
Very many photos from the same people
A photo of black barefoot children (who look very African to me) from Aachen, Germany
Many photos which don’t make sense to be to be geotagged i.e. their content is totally location insensitive e.g. a picture of a gun
Can someone tell me what's going on?
David
1 comment:
I just received a clarification from David Troy (the developer of FlickrVision)
We use geotagging data from the actual photos where it is available, and then rely on the user's profile location in cases where it is not. Because less than 1% of photos are geotagged, we rely on user profile location heavily.
This explains the pictures of the Eiffel Tower from Milwaukee and Omaha.......and all the other discrepancies.
The idea is great and I guess we shouldn't worry about any misrepresentation. I'm sure that FlickrVision can find a way to show which photos are geolocated and which merely indicate the Flickr member's home location. If Flickrvision encourages more folks to geotag, then we'll all be happy...
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