Going Places on Flickr: The Significance of Geographical Information in Photos

Dan Catt‘s talk at the upcoming Where 2.0: Going Places on Flickr: The Significance of Geographical Information in Photos

Every photo has a location—it was taken somewhere. For photo-sharing communities like Flickr, geotagging enriches the database with location metadata and makes digital photos more useful and relevant to users, allowing them to not only easily search and organize their own photos but better browse images from around the world. With nearly 50 million geotagged photos on Flickr, around 32 million of which are public, Flickr senior engineer Dan Catt was able to use Flickr’s open API to create a new feature called Places. Places is a zoomed-in view of a particular location and allows Flickr members and visitors to explore that location through iconic photos.

and at Web 2.0 A Flickr Approach to Making Sense of the World

What do you do when you have well over 50 million geotagged objects? How do you actually do anything constructive with that? With emphasis on the How and constructive parts.

To start with we’ll take a quick(ish) look at the current state of reverse geo-coding; mapping latitude and longitude to an actual place. And what to do when that place is the wrong place or technically the right place but not what anyone calls it. Why it seems as though it should be simple but in reality it’s all terribly hard and we’re still just at the very start of that one. Geocoding != Maps.