Tad's IT Blog
Posts tagged flickr api
iMapFlickr – Nifty Flickr Map Visualizer
Apr 23rd
Seeing as I’m a borderline-obsessive geotagger and geotag every last photo I put up on Flickr, I’m still trawling the net looking for the perfect way to visualize it all. Still haven’t found it, but did find something cool. This is a tool called iMapFlickr – a tool that lets you visualize your FLickr sets on a Google Maps based app, and then hosts such in a way you can iframe them into your site, or short-link them in a Twitter post.
As an example, here’s a visualization of my Baby 365 Project set on Flickr:
It’s nice, in that you get a pretty decent visualization of all of the places I’ve taken my daughter, in one map frame. There are a limit of how many dots it’ll show on the screen at one go, but at least it’s not missing any major ones. The plus on this over flickr’s built-in mapper is that (a) you can embed it, and (b) more importantly it will actually plot the whole set, rather than just the items in the thumbnails. Flickr’s built-in mapper will only show about 20-30 data points on the map AT MOST, and this looks like it’s getting a good deal more.
What I’d like to make it cooler – and what prevents it from being my perfect map visualizer:
- Icons: Unfortunately, with shadowed icons like this, it creates a funky map artifact in DC where I have about 100 photos all clustered around one spot. It’d be better to have real small icons that would make clusters of close datapoints easier to visualize.
- Not just sets: I’m still looking for a tool that’ll visualize EVERYTHING I have loaded into Flickr. I guess I could make an EVERYTHING set and add EVERYTHING to it, but that’s kind of a hack. I really would like a neat way to just see ALL of my photos on a map.
Still – a nice tool, and a nifty map that was easy to just paste on here.
GeoTag Junkie: Where my Last 500 Photos were Taken
Dec 30th
Unfortunately, the wonderful Flickr map only lets you display as many points on the map (at a time) as you can fit in thumbnail photos across your screen. So, for someone like me who meticulously geo-tags every photo taken (in the hopes I’ll one day be able to locate the ideal geo-data visualization app for my photos) the closest thing I can get to a good map is the Flickr Organizr. Here’s a photo of how it looks:
Using KML to Show Flickr Maps on Google Earth
Jun 24th
KML File from Flickr being used in Google Earth
In trying to solve an issue I’m having with Bing Maps and using the Bing Maps API to import KML for map overlays, I ended up solving a problem I had earlier, where I was trying to find a nice way to show all of the photos of my road trip across america on one map or one presentation.
Flickr’s already-excellent mapping feature lacks one major use case, where one wants to be able to take a set of a bunch of photos, and show ALL of them on a map. I.e. how I just did, where I wanted to display all of the pics of my road trip on one map.
Well, a fellow by the name of Adam Franco wrote a great script using the Flickr API to output Flickr set data as KML for use in Google Maps or Google Earth.
So now, as you can see from the photo above, I was easily able to take the Flickr set that I made for my Cross-Country trip (which is composed entirely of geo-tagged photos) and immediately export that to KML for display on Google Earth.
I’ll then be using that as a test case to see if I can get Bing Maps to import & use the KML as well!
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