Inspired by mapping capabilities of my new phone, I spent some time geocoding a bunch of my photographs on flickr this morning, tagging about 20% of them with location information. You can see the results on this map (though, I think if San Francisco is visible in the frame, hitting the green refresh at the bottom won’t bring up locations further afield even when you’re zoomed out). I’m sure best practice for this would be to add this information to EXIF metadata prior to uploading but it’s a little too late to think about that now. Going forward, the really right way to do this is in camera with a GPS, but that requires a really clunky hot shoe add-on like this these days. Here’s hoping the next generation SLRs will have this feature built in.
A couple of things I’ve noticed about this. First, there’s probably a quarter of my collection that doesn’t really need to be geotagged. Indoor shots of inanimate objects, random things inside my friend’s apartments aren’t really what anyone searching on a map would be looking for. I’m contemplating sticking those shots in the middle of the ocean just to get them out of my way as I work through the non-geotagged bin. Second, Yahoo Maps is really frustrating to use, it feels several generations stupider than Google Maps. It turns out to be much faster and easiest (if clunkier) to do the searching in Google in a second tab, then copy/past the address I find there into the map tab of the Flickr Organizer. Also, what’s with all the clouds? Below is what I see when I try to place my stuff from my Plymouth set. Yikes. It’s all under there somewhere, I guess. This kind of thing has come up a couple of times.
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