Geotagging gone wild

A few days ago, I posted about the new geotagging features in Flickr. Turns out, the feature has made quite a splash.

When we were doing our projections for how many photos Flickr members would geotag, we though that we’d hit Spiral Jetty a million in the first month, maybe even as fast as two weeks. Instead, 24 hours in, there were 1,234,384 geotagged photos (and now more than 1.6 million geotagged photos as I write this, about 9 hours later).

That’s incredible. This is going to wind up being an amazing resource. Millions of photos linked geographically to the proper location. How long before sites like Wikipedia incorporate the information natively? Imagine marking the entry about the Grand Canyon with it’s exact coordinates. Then all photos that have been geotagged with that exact locatoin could be pulled in as part of the entry. Would it wind up pulling in some personal vacation photos? Of course it would, but that’s what you get when you have such a massive resource to be able to draw upon. I wonder if there would be some way to rank photos based on relevance?

One other related resource to share though. Zonetag is a little app that you can install on your cell phone that will allow you to upload your photos to Flickr with the geo-information pre-tagged. It uses the method that I speculated about a few months ago. When you take a photo, it tags the photo with the cell tower that you are connected to at the time. Then, when the photo gets uploaded, it will translate that cell tower into true geotags. It does require somebody, anybody, to specify where that cell tower was, but once somebody does it once, it is saved for everybody. While this won’t be 100% accurate (a cell tower covers a pretty fair distance), it does get the photo in the right neighborhood at least, and you can always go back in and tweak it later.

Next step? Zonetag needs to determine y our exact location by using tranagulation. Don’t see that happening any time soon though. Privacy fanatics may have some issues with that one…