What's the best Web site for geotagged photos?
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Photo-sharing Web sites are getting better at handling pictures based on where they were taken. My top pick is Flickr, with SmugMug and Google's Picasa tied for second.
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In June, on a trip to Italy, I wanted a copy of a picture a stranger was taking. "What if his camera, as it was taking the picture, also broadcast the bits to every other camera in range. My camera, sitting in my napsack would detect a picture being broadcast, and would capture it. (Or my cell phone, or iPod.)" Then on August 29, a review in the NY Times of the Fujifilm Z10fd said it could beam photos to other cameras that support the IRSimple protocol. Unfortunately the camera wouldn't ship until October. Well, it's now November, the camera is shipping. Yet none of the reviews on Amazon mention its social feature. I was thinking of getting one, but then what's the point if no one else has it? According to the reviews it's a fairly ordinary digital camera otherwise. (Though it has a "blog mode" which is mentioned but not adequately explained in the video ad.) So -- do you think this this baby bootstraps? Are social cameras here now, or a thing of the future?
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David Sklar points out some of the new base sites that are being offered on the PHP-based mashup site, Ning.    It's been a lot of hard work, so I'm quite excited that we've just released three great new Ning sites: Ning Videos, Ning Photos, and Ning Group.   Plus, all three sites have the juicy bits that every site on the Ning platform gets -- things such as cloneability, complete customization, and built-in REST APIs. I've been watching the feeds for clones of photos and videos -- I suppose seeing who's cloned sites you care about is the Web 2.0 version of ego surfing.    He also talks about some of the features of the Ning Photo cloneable site like the slideshow and, in Ning Video, the embeddable player. The Ning Group application also has parsing abilities to help with sharing documents/music/photos/etc with anyone.
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Blog: Web site lets people post classified videos
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Jonathan Snook points out a new take on working with tags on a site - a focus cloud.   With this fairly broad classification I set about working out exactly what a Focus Cloud should show. To me the name could only suggest one thing. It shows the area which currently is receiving the most Focus! [...] So a Focus Cloud should show not what has been the most popular tags overall, but what is the most popular tags at present. What is your current focus.   The post not only includes the theory behind these focus clouds but also has some PHP code to back it up (using the del.icio.us interface and tags as the foundation of the cloud's contents). The full code for the cloud can be grabbed here.
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Finnish voters searching for trustworthy politicians to elect in March polls can now use an Internet Web site to summon up photographs of candidates who resemble themselves.
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(InfoWorld) - Google is coming for you. In fact, Google's minions are driving Chevy Cobalts with roof-mounted 360-degree digital cameras, and they want to take your picture. Smile! You're on Googlecam. In an unprecedented campaign, Google is enhancing its Google Maps service with a new Street View feature that allows you to view crisp, navigable photos of roads in nine major cities across the United States, including San Francisco, New York, San Diego, and Denver. (To see the full list, go to maps.google.com and click the Street View link on the upper-right corner.) Once you zoom in close enough, you can click the Street View link and look around the location, or click an arrow to see the next Street View photo. To snap the pictures, Google mounted digital cameras on the roof of passenger cars -- reportedly Chevy Cobalts, according to the tech blog Gizmodo -- and drove around San Francisco and San Diego. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company partnered with Immersive Media for the underlying photo technology and has worked with third-party firms for street-level photography for the additional cities outside of California. Only San Francisco and San Diego use high-resolution street-level images, however. Other cities use lower-res captures. Street View could be a boon for "landmark drivers" who prefer driving instructions such as "Turn left at the large brick church, and drive until you get to the pizza place on the corner" as opposed to "Meet me at Second Street and Fourth Avenue." It certainly reveals how far Google will go to prove its mapping prowess -- and, incidentally, attract users to more localized advertising. According to Greg Sterling at Sterling Market Intelligence in Oakland, Calif., Google has a Business Referral Representative program that sets a precedent for localized involvement. That program involves Google representatives providing local business information and photos to Google for a fee. Sterling said that precedent for collecting local information and photos is being continued with the Street View program. Street View is "about creating more utility for consumers, which in turn will lead indirectly to ad revenue over the longer term. Google has long focused on small businesses and local users, so this is just trying to take those efforts to the next level," Sterling said. Still, regardless of whether Street View is purely a mapping enhancement or a new play for ad revenue, there is tough competition from Microsoft and others. There are also some nagging privacy issues to deal with, plus the sheer magnitude of the project. The story so far ... Of course, Street View is not a new idea. Amazon.com tried a 360-degree street-view mapping feature in its A9 service that it subsequently abandoned. Microsoft has provided a Bird's Eye View feature in Live Virtual Earth that allows you to zoom in on a location, albeit not quite to the street level. (There is a preview of Microsoft's "street side" technology that does allow you to see street-level views, but only for portions of Seattle and through a rather clunky interface.) Another competitor, EveryScape.com in Waltham, Mass., has mapped out the Union Square section of San Francisco with 360-degree street-level views and plans to "virtualize" four more cities this year. Users can sign up to become "scape" artists who drive city streets with roof-mounted cameras. There's a strong user-participation angle, but EveryScape doesn't have Google's funding or advertising incentive. Street View is an audacious project that, according Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at JupiterResearch in Darien, Conn., will likely expand to every major American city and even to higher-population rural areas. "Google is adding cool and interesting features to their mapping service as a way to enhance their core services and generate new revenue," he said. While Google has no set plans to update street-level photos on a regular basis, according to Google Maps product manager Stephen Chau, it does have policies for updating aerial shots on a regular basis that could set a precedent for Street View updates. Google fandom reaches new heights Google is immensely popular, of course, but Street View seems to have attracted an unprecedented level of interest, some of it perhaps even slightly obsessive. One Wired blog allowed users to submit odd Street View sightings, including a man being arrested and another urinating at a roadside. Other sites, such as Street View Gallery and Street View Spy, also allow users to post strange Street View sightings. There's even a Cafe Press T-shirt for those who don't want to be photographed. Google's Chau said the company encourages user participation, but only through the My Maps feature. "We get offers from people to drive the [camera] cars almost every day," he said. For users who want to participate through the My Maps feature, they can geo-tag their photos (adding location data) and post them in public forums. For example, after the bridge collapse in Minneapolis on Aug. 1, users posted photos of the fallen bridge and aftermath. Why the fandom? For photographer Charles Bandes in Boston, it's the community aspect -- the fact that a large company might be visiting. "I am fascinated by the idea that Google is taking snapshots of my community, and the idea that they might actually take a photo of me if they make a map of my neighborhood is even better." For Bandes and others, it's an opportunity to meet Google face-to-face. Meanwhile, from Google's standpoint, camaraderie with users could help them capture out-of-the-way locations. "I think user participation would be a great idea as Google simply can't do the level of coverage required alone," adds Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group in San Jose, Calif. Right-to-privacy controversy Yet, the idea of photographing the entire United States one street at a time is a monumental undertaking, even for Google. It's also controversial, especially for privacy-rights advocates. For example, BoingBoing users argue that it's wrong to take photos in public places and use them for commercial gain, that it's "creepy" for cars to be prowling city streets, and that -- if the government were monitoring the public with photographs on public streets, there would be more of an outcry. Tom Austin, a Gartner analyst covering Google, said that anyone can take photos in public places, but the privacy issue could become a problem when Google expands to foreign countries where photographing people on public streets requires a signed waiver. Google's Chau did say that the company filters out some photographs that might be perceived as inappropriate and that individuals can request that the company remove specific photographs. That kind of user-specific filtering could be a death blow to Street View, however, once it expands to hundreds of U.S. cities, because monitoring such a vast library would be nearly impossible. Whether the local advertising monetization works or the privacy issues persist, or whether many more metropolitan areas become "Google-ized" this year are all interesting questions waiting to be answered.
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Photocopying wallet information pays off.
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Science & environment: If your photos fail to impress a simple online photo-editing program could bring them up to scratch
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A free plug-in lets photographers create sorted lists of necessary gear for photo shoots. Plus, Microsoft makes it easier to find raw image codecs.
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Featured Photo is a module that allows you to display "featured photos" on the homepage of your phpWebSite. This release requires phpWebSite 1.0.x.    The new 1.0.0 release was completely rewritten for phpWebSite 1.0.x.  Because of this, compatibility with phpWebSite 0.10.x was lost.  (0.10.x users can still download Featured Photo 0.4.0).  New in this release is the ability to add photo blocks to more than just the homepage.  Each page could have its own featured photo.  In addition, "click to enlarge" is finally implemented.   You can grab the module here:   http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=81360&package_id=83570&release_id=252821   Make sure you have the following installed before attempting to install this module: Core: 1.0.3 or later Boost: 1.9.3 or later  If you have any questions or comments about Featured Photo, please contact Greg Meiste. Enjoy the new version!
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Attaching location data to images enables new ways to search photos, give slide shows or be a virtual tourist. For now, early adopters only need apply.Photos: A look at geotagging technology
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Canon G9 review...Photophlow gives Flickr a new face...Mozilla's Weave project...People paparazzi...new SLR rumors...hardware hacking.
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Q Most of the online mapping sites can't find my home address. Is there a company I can contact to fix this?
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We have some big news today for FlickrFan users, a major new source of high-def photography for the networked living room. They come from Agence France-Presse, one of the world's great news organizations, and a fantastic source of high-resolution news photography. I met with Agence France-Presse when I was in Paris in December, introduced them to FlickrFan and explained what we were doing with the Associated Press. They got excited, it took a little while to work out the technical details, but now we're ready to go. The updates are all out, here's the howto for FlickrFan users. Change #30: Agence France-Presse photos in FlickrFan. There were unique challenges in this project because their flow is huge. Yesterday we got over 3000 new photos. Because there are so many, I asked my friend Matt Mullenweg, if his company Automattic could help us out with server space and bandwidth, and he said yes. The AFP pictures are hosted on wordpress.com. Many thanks to Matt and his company for helping us out. To the extent we're bootstrapping a new use of the net, which I hope is what we're doing, Matt's company has made the kind of contribution we'd like to see more companies make. Usually the companies are happy to make the money, but not willing to help out with the bootstrap, which often costs money. Matt has always been a great guy and a visionary. I thank him and hope that FlickrFan users find an appropriate way to thank him too. And also, please consider the generosity of Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. We all hope that there's a market here, a way to monetize the flow of high-resolution photography to enrich and inform. Other content companies have been reluctant to take a chance on the Internet, we saw that in the early days of RSS and podcasting. I feel that these two media companies are playing the same pioneering role that the New York Times played with RSS 2.0 and NPR played in podcasting. Associated Press and Agence France-Presse deserve our respect and admiration for steping out, for going first, this is how new Internet activities get going. This is what we call market leadership, the real kind. Bravo!! And this couldn't come at a better time, with tomorrow being Super Tuesday here in the USA. Think of all the great photographs we're going to get in the next few days! Kevin Tofel helped test the feed over the weekend.
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Bryan Gardiner  reports that Google has optimized its popular Picasa photo service for the iPhone. He quotes Google software engineer Joe Walnes as saying:  âToday, Iâm happy to tell you that weâve just released this new iPhone interface for Picasa. After you go to Picasa on your iPhone and log in, you can quickly see all your albums that youâve uploaded to Picasa web. If you click on any of the albums, you can get a full view of your picture with comments from your friends.â
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Adding location data to images is a pain right now, but geotagging was worth it, and it'll get easier. Here are my warnings and a wish list.