Geotagging Imagery and Video


IsWHERE is a log of my thoughts, reflections, and news/blog links on the emergence of image and video geospatial tagging. On May5th this year, I opened a second blog to deal with more detailed aspects of tools for FalconView and TalonView can be found at RouteScout. Trends I want to try and follow are the various disruptions resulting from spatial smart-phones, how many GPS devices are out there, smart-cameras, and other related news. And yes, I have a business interest in all of this. My company Red Hen has been pioneering this sort of geomedia for more than a decade.

So beyond a personal blog, I also provide a link to IsWHERE a shareware tool created by Red Hen Systems to readily place geoJPEG or geotagged imagery and soon GEM full motion media kept on your own computer(s) into Google Earth/Map from your File Manager media selection. Works great for geotagged images from Nikon, Ricoh, Sony, iPHONE, Android and all geo-smartphones that can create geotagged images. IsWhere - read about it

IsWhere Free Download (XP and VISTA)

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IsWhere Visitors

Monday, November 27, 2006

Flickr - One Way Only?

Excuse my absence. Been busy moving.

I do have an observation that really has me a bit disturbed on the apparent one-way-ization of Flickr images. While exploring the Flickr "tagging" phenomena I discovered that when you down-load a Flickr image, either mine or other shared images, they arrive essentially stripped of all their tags including normal EXIF data they started with? I guess the Yahoo outfit does not like the idea that tagged images might be used elsewhere? There must be money "money in-them-thar Flickr images"? Once they got you by your pictures, the rest soon follows?

On the other hand, images that I have good EXIF data in when shared via Picasa.net retains the EXIF metadata - up and down. Only "detail" is you need to download a shared catalog with Picasa. But once they are on your local drive, you can work with them via Adobe and other image processing tools.

I prefer the Picasa.net design and attitude towards sharing an image's metadata: keep your images on your own storage, upload only the ones you really want to share, and then pass around the proper link to your shared catalogs. Those that download your shared catalogs get the metadata as well.

If you want to explore some of the differences between Flickr and Picasa.Net take a read at:

http://retrovirus.com/incr/

"First step: get the photos into Picasa, Google’s excellent free Windows photo organizer. I used FlickrDown to download the photoset from Flickr to my Windows box. It was simple, though I was sad that there was no way to preserve my photos’ tags. I then downloaded the new version of Picasa from the Picasa Web Albums site. (You need to get this specific version to be able to do the fancy stuff I’m about to describe.) Picasa immediately found and imported the downloaded photos—so far, so good."

1 comment:

Rev Dan Catt said...

[disclaimer: I work for Flickr :) ]

Just thought I'd add a note. If you're downloading the *original* photo from flickr, all it's original EXIF info should be there.

We have a policy of not touching your original photo in any way (it's your photo after all), the scaled versions do have EXIF stripped out, but that's more a function of the image scaler than anything.

Because we'll not modify the original and not remove anything from the it, the flip side also applies, we'll not add anything to your photo, so the tags don't get pushed into the EXIF.

This *may* possibly change in the future with YACBO (Yet Another Check Box Option), but the Do Not Alter The Users Original, is a pretty paramount rule.

Hope that makes some kind of sense.

From a geotagging point of view. If you have the location lat/long information in the EXIF when you upload it, then you can tell flickr to use that. Even if you move the photo on the map afterward, your original EXIF info is still there when you download the original.

If you use the organizer tool to drop photos on the map. Then the location isn't pushed into the EXIF, and won't be in the photo when you download it.

But you can use the API to grab your photos, grab the tags (and location) for them, and do what you want with them when you have them. We're starting to see 3rd party download tools appearing that do that for you.

There's really no intentional lock in going on.

Oh and glad to have found your blog too :)

Dan