Tad's IT Blog
Posts tagged flickr
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.
Important for SEO: Digg, Flickr & “nofollow” links
Mar 24th
In looking for some good “startup” references to give to a client who wants to be able to do their own SEO, I found a number of them that were listing out good social media services that could be used for link-building. A number of these posts (dated 2009) listed Flickr and Digg both as services which are excellent for posting content and links, and thereby getting some additional search engine juice.
However, in September of 2009, Digg implemented a policy on nofollow links, making all but the most popular items carry a “rel=nofollow” tag in the link, making Google essentially disregard the link, in terms of page rank calculations.
There have been a number of other services which, in 2006, were part of your average SEO staple to quickly and easily generate some back-links for your news or video content. Now, they’re non-entities, with the services switching to nofollow links to discourage link spamming.
Such services that now are void in terms of SEO benefit are:
- Digg: uses nofollow links on all but the most popular stories
- Flickr: HTML in descriptions now automatically inserts “rel=nofollow” into any links.
- WordPress: comments in WordPress.com blogs now automatically insert rel=”external nofollow” into any links, including the link for the website you identify your WordPress user with.
- Faves.us (formerly BlueDot): now all links are rel=nofollow
- Simpy: all links are now rel=nofollow
The good news is, that this allows these services to be used more for what the creators intended them for, instead of an SEO link-spam playground. The bad news is that, for SEO’s and people looking to get continuing benefit from links posted to such services, one has to work a bit harder to find services and sites which will carry links to yours.
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:
Flickr vs. YouTube: Mobile Video Quality
Jul 29th
I just posted on the quality & feature differences between Flickr video and YouTube, saying also that their mobile feature sets were quite similar, though video quality was about the same.
How wrong I just was, with respect to mobile video quality.
Have a look at these two samples, taken on an iPhone 3G, of the same video mentioned in my last post:
Flickr Video: [original video]
YouTube Video: [original video]
For some reason, the H.264 video that YouTube is encoding for the iPhone is of just the absolute worst quality – throughout the video, one can barely even tell what’s happening. Whereas, in contrast, the Flickr video is totally sharp and looks fantastic.
Odd – that was a comparison I didn’t expect. I’d be interested to see if that’s an iPhone-only difference, or if that’s the case on Windows Mobile and Android devices as well.
Flickr & YouTube – Video Quality & Features Comparison
Jul 29th
Flickr has a little known, and not oft-used ability for users to upload videos, as well as photos. As Flickr is primarily a photo site for photo enthusiasts, the purpose of Flickr videos was not to host the latest Shakira music video or Baby Bloopers w/Gangsta Rap soundtrack – but rather to augment one’s photographic exploits with moving pictures as well. Thus the reasoning behind Yahoo! putting a 90-second limit on Flickr video.
But, as photo display quality is such a hallmark of Flickr photos, I decided to do a little comparison on video quality, and compare it to the 900lb Gorilla, YouTube.
Following is a video I took of the first mountain bike ride on my new mountain bike, taken yesterday. It’s got a lot of full-screen motion, a worst-case scenario for the Flash Video encoders both at Flickr and YouTube. Here’s how they look:
FLICKR:
YOUTUBE:
Interestingly enough, it appears to me that the YouTube video is a bit crisper and has better motion details than the Flickr video. YouTube used to have positively the worst video quality, but it looks like they’ve definitely made some improvements of late.
But then, in terms of a features comparison, let’s take a look at the way these two services display video, to get an idea of which would be the better context to display such video clips in:
Video Tools:
YouTube is obviously the hands-down winner here. They offer annotations, audio change-outs (so you can swap out my grunting and “whoa nelly” with Crystal Method or whatever), the ability to change out the displayed thumbnail, closed-captioning, etc. Flickr offers no such tools – just the ability to upload, and then edit the caption, title & tags just like any Flickr Photo.
Display Context:
Probably the best reason why one would want to display your videos on Flickr is the display context of your video. If you’re in the middle of a camping trip, and you take 10 photos and 2 videos with your digital camera, it makes the most sense to be able to display all of those items in the same place. Displaying just the photos on Flickr or Photobucket or Facebook, and then putting the videos on YouTube doesn’t allow you to simply send someone to one page, and have them be able to see your trip.
To wit, see this set of my recent cross-country trip, which has a number of videos interspersed with the photo content – but the photo content all kept in order and in context.
Also, Flickr gives you the ability to display all your photos on a map, which gives yet another option for display context.
Mobile Capabilities:
Now this is an area where I would have expected YouTube to be in the lead completely, but Yahoo! has been putting quite a bit of work lately into their mobile sites. If you browse to this video on Flickr using an iPhone browser, you’ll see the page reformatted for the iPhone, complete with working video links. Clicking on the video then pulls up an H.264 version of the video that is playable on the iPhone. Slick!
Displaying a KML Feed on Bing Maps
Jun 24th
Okay – while not exactly where I wanted to be, I now see that I’m able to easily display a KML feed in Bing Maps (the artist formerly known as Microsoft Virtual Earth) by appending a “mapurl” parameter to maps.bing.com, and then feed it in the URL to your KML file. Like
For example, if you click through on the link above, you’ll see the KML file that I generated from my Flickr cross-country set, then superimposed on Bing Maps, with a nicely-formatted sidebar containing all of the other various metadata stored in the KML file.
I’ve still not been able to get their other sample to work, probably due to some sort of mime-type issue, but the above is a pretty nice feature.
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!
The Trip Map – Web 2.0 Style
May 31st
Now that my cross-country trip is drawing to a close (I should be pulling in to my destination in the DC area tomorrow) I’ve been trying to figure out a cool Web 2.0-style way of displaying where we went on this trip, with the route we took, geo-tagged photos, videos, and all of that sort of thing.
Unfortunately, I could not find any service that would let me mash up the geo-data I already have stored in Flickr (and I’ve painstakingly geo-tagged all my photos) and then add in some sort of way to draw the lines where we went on the trip.
Furthermore, Flickr maps – as cool as they are – will only display a page of your photos at a time. So, although I have representative photos that basically draw a line all of the way across the USA, you can’t see that if you look at the map. So, I’ve been trying to find something better.
Now, Google Maps lets me do something like the following, where I can at least easily load up a map with all manner of meta-data (points, lines that follow roads, HTML, etc) and slap it up on a publicly-available map:
View Cross-Country Road Trip in a larger map
This is a step in the right direction, though I still can’t integrate my Flickr geo-data with the map. So, that leaves me to painstakingly re-add all of my geo-data, or figure out another make-sense way of displaying the data. Still pretty nifty, but someone has GOT to have already worked out a solution to this. It’s not like I’m the first blogger/web 2.0 geek to go on a road trip!
The Country Road is Taking Me Home
May 30th
I’ve had a few admonishments for no blog posts over the last two days – sorry about that. I had an awful Internet connection which [gasp] I couldn’t debug, and couldn’t make work for me. So, I had to wait until tonight, when I’ve finally made it to Virginia (Lexington, VA, in the bottom of the state) with a mercifully good Internet connection, so as to update my photos and such.
Yesterday and today were a gorgeous change from the flatness of the midwest that we’ve had for the past few days, as we veered off of the Interstate to instead go on state roads through the Ohio River Valley.
They twist and turn and have great scenery along the way – from all of my various road trips, I’m real surprised that I haven’t yet been here.
I’m going to figure out a good way of depicting my trip through here so far, as I still haven’t found a good way to annotate a Flickr Map. So, I’ll leave the mapping to a future post, and for now leave you with this:
And here’s a map of our recent West Virginia & Ohio River Valley Photos:
First Refresh of Flickr & Flickr Map
May 26th
I’ve just started loading all of my trip photos to date into my Flickr Account, now that I’m at a hotel with some zippety-quick wifi. I have to drive all day tomorrow, though, so I only got up through Las Vegas. But, you can see what I’ve got on the map here:
Sorry if some of you aren’t map fanatics like I am, but the whole geo-tagging of photos, and then browsing them with a map interface just does not get old with me.
We’re in Kansas right now, so I have a lot more photos to load up, but let me know if you liked these. My favorites so far are these two, both in San Francisco:
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