There’s huge excitement out there on Flickr’s announcement today that it meshes with Yahoo maps to enable geotagging of photos. In other words, you can show the world, on a Yahoo map, where a Flickr photograph was taken. [tag]Flickr[/tag]‘s video introducing it is very slick, and I look forward to trying it. But there are issues, if not downright problems.
Thomas Hawk, Chief Evangelist for photo-sharing rival Zooomr, nails it in a long and generous piece about Flickr’s new toy:
Of course all of this business with geotagging (and not just at Flickr) raises a serious point that must be considered as well. In the past I’ve been critical of the fact that I’ve felt that my text tags have been locked into Flickr. This is not by Flickr design of course, they just have different priorities right now over building tag export tools etc. But the fact remains that I cannot get my tags out of Flickr and have them exported to another application. My frustration in the past has been due to the fact that I’ve spent hours and hours of time tagging photos and have not had an easy path to get this metadata out of Flickr. Geotagging of course is an even larger investment in time. With over 6,000 photos on Flickr now I’d probably want some pretty serious guarantee that my text and geotags would in fact be portable at some point before investing the amount of time necessary to commit to geotagging at Flickr.
This is almost a deal-breaker, for me. It took Flickr a long time to deal with [tag]metadata[/tag] embedded in images, but once it did so, it did so well (unlike lots of other photo-sharing software). How long before it reads geotags embedded in image files?
This is important because it means that one need only insert the metadata once into an image. The sure way to avoid Hawk’s fear of his tags being locked into Flickr is not to use Flickr to put the tags in the image in the first place. (Of course this does not help to recover tags inserted by other users, but that’s another story.)
I admit that I am highly sensitized to the whole business of image metadata because I have been banging that particular drum since shortly after I arrived at my place of work more than five years ago. So to receive an email this very morning asking me to upload a bunch of photos to a site with no search facilities and to “please ensure the information section is filled in (along with titles rather than numbers for the pictures)” rather suggests that absolutely nothing has got through to anyone.
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Now all we need is our cameras to have GPS chip in them when the picture is taken the metadata of the picture stores the location of where you are in lat, long. Then when you upload to flickr you are automaticly placed in the geotag system
Precisely! We already have cameras that insert geotagging data into the EXIF fields, and that neat Sony gizmo that will do the same. That is why we need Flickr to read those data.
Hi Jeremy,
Thanks for your write up on my review. You are right about user portability of data. We all should be striving to ensure that users have complete import/export/transfer options between online services and their hard drives.
Certainly Flickr is aware of this issue and I suspect that they at some point will actually have a Flickr developed tool to do some of this.
At Zooomr, we too need to do a better job at this. While we are committed to user portability we are still young and haven’t built export tools yet. I will say though that we are committed to this portability and will build these tools when time permits.
Thanks for continuing to beat the drum on this important topic.
Thanks Tom. Looking at the comments over on your original post, it seems that Flickr will suck in embedded geotag data from Exif, which is very good news. And it is possible — though beyond me — to get your data out via one of the Flickr APIs. Looks better and better.