Geotagging is the act of assigning geographical information—usually latitude and longitude—to the pictures you upload to the Web. If you make those photos public and viewable on an online map, visitors can see precisely where you snapped your pictures. Browse the Yahoo map at flickr.com/map , for example, and thousands of pink dots—representing photos from other members of the Flickr community—stretch from the coast of California to the plains of Africa. Flickr users have geotagged 5.5 million pictures since the new feature was introduced in August, a number that has surprised even Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield. “People are proud of their photos and want to show them off,” he says. “This gives their pictures a whole new layer of context.”
Combined with a search engine, the holy union between maps and photos is pretty powerful. Want to see lighthouses on the Great Lakes? Dive into the region on Yahoo Maps and type “lighthouse” into the search box: 500 photos dot the region’s coastlines. Or, scroll over to the map of London and type “bridges” into the search box—you’ll see 2,600 photos of overpasses along the Thames River. Independent developers have built similar photo-viewing applications that work on top of Google Maps and the stunning satellite imagery of Google Earth.
Tourists will find these new photo-augmented maps especially useful when planning trips. For example, Butterfield recently visited Angels Camp, near Jamestown, Calif. To prepare before he left, he browsed through geotagged Flickr photos of the gold-rush town and was able to preview other vacationer’s photos of the historic theater and the century-old Emporium Hotel. Feeling that offering was a bit skimpy, however, he now plans to upload and geotag his own trip photos. That in turn will provide a better photographic tour to the next prospective Angel Camp visitor.
The idea behind geotagging isn’t entirely new. In London, interactive systems designer Dan Catt has wanted to wed photos to maps for over a decade, since he worked on a CD-ROM that offered pictures affixed to maps of the best hiking trails in England. That project didn’t fly, but last year the first version of Google Maps gave Catt another opportunity. He hacked together a geotagging service that combined Google Maps with Flickr and posted notice of his invention back to the Flickr community. Thousands of early adopters became pioneering geotaggers, adding location information to their photos, or creating new Web sites and services around the idea of geotagging. These early efforts didn’t have the reach or scale to support the kind of widespread usage Flickr is now experiencing, partly because Flickr makes it so easy—users just drag and drop their pictures onto a map.
Catt disavows any notion that he created the geotagging movement. “I did the obvious. Putting photos onto maps was going to happen anyway,” he says. Yahoo clearly noticed his contribution and in November hired him as a senior Flickr engineer.
Catt thinks the budding geotagging phenomenon will motivate makers of digital cameras and camera-equipped cell phones to start integrating GPS chips into their devices. Today only a few cameras offer such functionality, but “we have given them a reason to start building it in,” he says. For now, geotaggers must either remember where they took their photos or buy a separate GPS device that communicates with their camera via Bluetooth. For those who don’t have the add-on and can’t quite recall where they took a photo, software like Zonetag from Yahoo Research promises to analyze a picture and offer suggestions partly by matching it against similar photographs.
All these initiatives remain somewhat experimental. Only when geotagging gets more seamless and pervasive will the historic marriage truly start to produce creative offspring. Flickr’s Butterfield envisions a day where he will wander a foreign city and call up on his mobile phone all the photographs taken within a one-mile radius. “I’ll be able to see if there’s a cool temple over here, or an art gallery over there, or a nearby pile of ancient ruins,” he says. “And my phone will tell me which direction to walk. The applications are limitless when you start thinking about it.”
We agree. Where do we send the wedding presents?
