Flickr, Geotagging and Google Earth
23 06 2006Last night I had one of those ‘wow! that’s cool’ moments.
A couple of weeks ago Shropshire CC allowed access to Flickr from our schools so I decided it was time to upgrade my free account to a Pro account. It was time to see what else I can do with my photos, and I had been discussing with Ewan about setting up a project to geotag and share some photos of Roman relics etc in Shropshire for Scottish schools to have access to.
I searched around Flickr and via a geotagging group I came across FlickrFly (FlickrFly is a script that can be linked from the description or comment of a geotagged Flickr Photo to fly you that location in Google Earth). I tried out one of the examples and decided to give it a go.
My next challenge was to find the gps location for my photos, I tried using Get-a-map from Ordnance Survey. I was able to pinpoint the place the photograph was taken and was given a Grid reference but I didn’t know how to convert this into a gps location, if anyone could tell me that would be great. I then tried to use GoogleMaps to get the gps data, as with get-a-map I could find the place but this time I couldn’t find any location data. My next stop was GoogleEarth, the mapping data wasn’t as good as the previous two so I guessed at exactly where the photo was taken but it did give me a longitude and latitude figure.
Now I had the data I revisted my Flickr photos and when into my C2C set to see if I can geotag some of the photos I took while cycling across England. A selected my photo of the Gateshead Millenium Bridge as I thought this would be a an easy place to find. Google Earth returned me 54 58′11.24″ N 1 35′57.11″ W, so I tagged the photo:
- geo:lon=1.355711
- geo:lat=54.581124
- geotagged
I then copied the simple html code from FlickrFly into the description for the photo, it appeared like this:
Fly to this location
(Requires Google Earth)
I was so excited and clicked on Fly to this location, I told my browser to open the file with GoogleEarth. GoogleEarth booted up and started flying around, unfortunately I ended up not on the Gateshead bridge! I had a look around the preferences on Google Earth and noticed I could change the Lat/Lon from Degrees, Minutes, Seconds to Degrees. I went back to where the bridge actually is and I got the following, lat 54.969780 lon -1.599194, so I deleted my original tags and changed them to these:
- geo:lon=-1.599194
- geo:lat=54.969780
I clicked on the fly to this location link again and it worked - how cool was that! I then did another photo to check I had it cracked and it worked yet again, I was so excited I had to show my wife - I think she was impressed.
Just think of all the different applications for this in learning, school trips - geotag the photos and people could watch the journey you made, the romans study that hopefully Ewan and I will sort out soon etc.
Glad you like FlickrFly.
Best way I know to convert Grid References to lat/lon is to use one of the myriad calculators at http://www.nearby.org.uk/
I think the box on the homepage works, or there is an explicit Coordinate Calculator link down the page a bit.
Another thing
You can add a link to show the location in Google Maps as well - just use a link to http://www.robogeo.com/Flickr2Map/?type=map&view=hybrid
See this page - http://www.flickr.com/photos/robroy/147169570/
For an example of a nice way to format all this stuff.
Rob, thanks for the link to http://nearby.org.uk that worked really well to get the lat/lon data I required. I have added the google map link to a photo and will add more when I get home from work, I have also copied your nice way of formatting it. Thanks again.
Well done Steve. This is what I was blethering on about last summer when I first suggested that Shropshire ought to get Flickr unblocked. It’s going to be so useful for geography departments to use to do eg virtual field trips, with pupils able to add comments on the geographical features photographed, in the context of their global location too.
If you have a GPS you can easily get the lat/lon or the grid location by creating a waypoint when you take the photo. This is what I tend to do when I’m out image gathering.
Happy snapping!