GeoTagging Flickr / Discuss

Adrian Barnes    says:

As it's been about a year since Dan Catt revealed how to get a KML feed of your geotagged photos, I thought it might be a good time to ask what's been happening as far as viewing your geotagged photos on Flickr is concerned, and where Flickr might be going with this.

First off, and I think most of you will agree with me here, viewing geotagged photos within the Flickr website has not been and is still not a great experience. I'd put this mainly down to two reasons: firstly, the way your map of photos is split into sections of only 20 photos each, and secondly, the fact that the Yahoo Maps aerial photography is still a long way behind both Google Maps/Earth and Microsoft Live Maps in terms of quality.

So when KML feeds direct from Flickr came along last year, lo, there was much rejoicing. Now I could easily see my geotagged photos in glorious 3D Google Earth, and send the KML file linked into Google Maps to friends and family who might not have Google Earth.

However, over the last year this promising start doesn't seem to have been followed up with anything - or am I missing something?

The overriding problem with the KML feed is that it still only shows 20 photos. When I want to send my family a link showing where the photos from my last trip were taken, chances are I have more than twenty. At the moment I'm having to use the time-consuming workaround of separately tagging my photos from the trip into groups of twenty, and then manually dragging the photo placemarks from the KML feed output in Google Earth into a single KML file that I can email.

Also for some reason the KML feed doesn't display properly in Google Maps - the photos don't show when you click on the placemarks. If you use the geoFeed link the photos show up fine, but without the thumbnail icons.

Finally I note that you can only get KML feeds for public photos. When sending around the aforementioned holiday snaps as a KML I'd like to be able to include those photos restricted to friends and family.

Until these are sorted I'm still relying on a combination of workarounds - involving considerable amounts of manually copying and pasting URLs into the KML file - to share my photos the way they should be shared. I guess what I'm basically asking is, has there been any progress on viewing geotagged photos in the last year and does anyone know if there are any plans for the future?

Anyway, these are only my personal observations, and I wouldn't want to be seen as speaking for anyone else, so please let me know your thoughts.
Posted at 6:17AM, 2 June 2008 PDT ( permalink )