From the Powerhouse Museum comes the news that they have joined the Commons on Flickr. From their website:

“The Powerhouse Museum is the first museum in the world to release publicly-held historical photographs for access on Flickr, one of the largest online photo communities in the world. The Museum joins the world’s largest photo library, the US Library of Congress, which released its first photos for public access on Flickr in January this year.”

This means that there will be some fantastic historical photo collections from them posted up on Flickr. Rights associated with them are easily understood and whats more, they have geo-tagged many of the photos so that you can view them on a map. The mapping service is the Yahoo! one - I had a look and while the satellite imagery is great, the map itself didn’t have much detail but I guess that will come. Users are encouraged to tag and comment on the photos and that information will ultimately be fed back into the collection records.

Another great initiative  from the Powerhouse Museum!

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

Visiting one of our service providers this morning gave me a chance to play with a photo geo-tagging service. locr provides a service that uses an internal or external GPS receiver to tag your photos with GPS coordinates which you can then upload to their website to share with the rest of the world. It certainly makes geo-tagging your photos very easy - it is all done automatically rather than running a script later which tags your photos by comparing timestamps on them with timestamps in a GPS receiver.
I am still coming to grips with a new phone (its turning into a love/hate affair) so the quality of the photos taken here isn’t good. locr runs a program on the phone that you use to take photos with. As I didn’t really delve too deep into instructions the photos aren’t that well focussed - however, in my hurry, I wasn’t sure whether there was a way to focus the camera using locr or not.
The phone takes a few minutes to pick up the GPS positioning so you really need to anticipate when you are going to take that first photo (something not easily achieved in many situations).
Anyway, once the photos were taken, they could be immediately uploaded to the web which was great.
You can see these photos here. locr has a javascript ‘badge’ that you can embed in your site/blog etc but it is misbehaving with our blog software at the moment and I haven’t had time for a closer look.

Cheers,
Jerry.

technorati tags: locr, Geo-tagging photos

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back