Crankybunny

Just found this today.

This guy Adam, has written an application that will turn your geotagged photoset on Flickr into a KML file.  This is a missing link for the masses.

Link to online application is here: http://www2.adamfranco.com/photosetToKML.php

After agonizing over how to share my photos both in just a visual format as well as a geographic I think that there are two main ways to share photos over the web.

1) Use a free but limited service like Picasa Web Albums (avail via your Google sign in), Flickr, or Panoramio (also Google).  The free services will limit something - either space used (Google allows more space for mail than photos at this point in time), upload amount, set making capabilities, photo dimensions.  In many cases though you can start paying to remove these storage barriers. 

The main problem with using a third-party photo storage service is that your photos are renamed-there would be just too many copies of rover.jpg or myhouse.jpg or some long string of numbers assigned by your camera.  With this rename, all links to the original name of your photo are lost so you can’t reference them in a url.  That is where photosetToKML.php comes in handy.  The only real problem here is that you have limited sets available to you with Flickr and no one has come up with a method for Picasa Web Albums or Panoramio yet.  I’m sure someone will.

2) The other method is to hold your card close to your chest and put your photos on your own webhost.  I would recommend reducing the file size/dimensions of your photos for this option - keeping the 2MB+ images on your home computer (don’t forget to back them up though!).  I use a 640×480 image size for my other website (http://www.steady-as-she-goes.com).  My indespensible tool for creating geotagged (geolocated) photos and KML files in this instance is RoboGeo because you can enter a directory where your photos are stored and RoboGeo will automatically create those pesky html links for you.

With all the options for photo-sharing (and I haven’t even mentioned the for-money sites) it is becoming difficult to settle down.  Everyone wants to do different things with their photos - the quantity is proliferating, but the locational quality is questionable. And no one really has a good answer yet for the "why" of geotagging general photos. 

I know why I want to do it - I think that it is interesting to be able to show my vacation photos on a map - or in a pop-up to people who are interested in my journeys - but when you multiply me by millions - what can we get out of the resulting photos as a society?  If all the photos are sitting in a bunch different, unconnected services(it’s too much of a pain in the ass to put them on multiple services - and a waste of space) what is going to tie them together and what information are we going to derive from them (and their location and comments)?