Ben Ward

Geo Follow-up

. Updated: .

Hello, welcome to dial-a-view
To locate the area in which you wish to observe
You must program in the longitude and the latitude
For a closer, more detailed picture
Use either the zoom or micro-zoom controls
Good luck

‘Miner at the Dial-a-View’ – Grandaddy

Following my pondering about Geo-Accuracy earlier in the week, I’ve finished geotagging (almost all) my Flickr photos and spent a bit of time whether some sort of representation of inaccuracy could be incorporated gracefully into the geo microformat.

Meanwhile on Flickr, I accidentally discovered this:

Wait a moment! We recommend that you place your photos on the map at a higher accuracy level (zoomed in closer). If you drop your photos here, they won't be seen as people zoom in, because it's no clear where they were actually taken. Are you sure you'd like to drop your photo/photos here?

Warning message from the Flickr Organizr tool

So the wonderful revelation is that Flickr already looks out for vague, less accurate geotagging, allowing you to flag something as inaccurate but still make use of the mapping features. That’s very well thought out. I wonder if they express it through the API, or in mark-up, or if it’s just a background flag.

Comments

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  1. Well, according to the API docs locations are returned with a numeric ‘accuracy’ property. I can only assume that it corresponds somehow to the zoom level of the map when it was placed, but the documentation is rather scrappy on this point.

  2. I guess they should really allow tagging with a bounding-box, two pairs of lon/lat coordinates at diagonal opposites of a box.

    Do they allow for searching for photos within an area, or any other kind of spatial query?

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