The world as frankps sees it!
Posts tagged Flickr
Lots of photo taken
0On Thursday I came back to Norway after having been two weeks in Mindszent, Hungary. Two weeks with beautiful spring and temperatures as high as 26-27 degrees most of the time. It was also two weeks spent with family and friends.
Lots of photos were taken, and they are now all available on my Flickr account as two photo sets: Julia and Mindszent 2009. As you can see from this blog entry, I spent some time on getting to know my SLR camera and Lightroom.
Home in Oslo I yesterday visited Fotovideo, and had a look at Nikon 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G IF-ED AF-S VR lense. I want to be able to do shots from distance, especially of animals and flowers. I saw lots of animals in Mindszent this time, animals like deer, lots of rabbits and pheasants, some falcons or eagles, a few white storks and great white egrets. And I could hear a woodpecker from time to time. But with 18-55mm I could simply not get close enough.
The lense got tested, and “flower” was shot with the full use of the lense. It was about 7-8 meters away:
So the lense is something I will try to buy when I finished renewing my appartment. What I ended up buying yesterday was a tripod for my camera. I ended up with Benro A-157, and then went up to Akerselva and did photos of the wild river (snow is melting up in the mountains around Oslo):
Geotagging in a whole new way!
03 years ago
Geotagging with the innovative Flickr bike! Fun, fun, fun …
A review of Locly, a Geosearch application for iPhone
3I’m currently working on a web project at work, where one of my tasks is to look in to trends. One of the trends I have looked in to is smart phones with great web experiences and another is mashup technologies. During the project I came over an iPhone application called Locly.
Ask yourself, how many times have you been in a new place and had no travel book or map with you. I guess your answer would be quite a few. Locly is an application that can find attractions, cafes and shops near by you, by making use of the inbuilt GPS of the 3G iPhone, or your local base station data if you have the first generation iPhone. With Locly you can also look at local photos from Flickr, and pull up Twitter or Wikipedia entries that are close to where you are now. Locly is reported to work in many countries throughout the world, but I can only say that it has worked surprisingly well for me here in Oslo, Norway.
Locly is simply the best combination of geobased searches and mashups I have seen so far, and that not only on mobile devices.
The mandatory screenshots are of course published on Flickr.
Geotagging Photos: A Review of Sony GPS-CS1 and HoudahGeo
8
I have since spring this year been working with trend analyzes on where the Internet is going. There are many great Web 2.0 applications out there, and some of them combines great hardware, desktop and web applications in ways that 2-3 years ago were unthinkable.
On Friday I bought a Sony GPS-CS1 at FOTOVIDEO. So why this device? GPS-CS1 officially only comes with support for Windows, but being a USB device that mounts on your desktop like a USB Pen Drive, should make it close to platform independent! No advanced Bluetooth driver is needed. I’m keeping my private photos on my MacBook Pro, so for me MacOS X support was a need. Having said that you might get problems with mounting the device on older versions of MacOS X, but Apple have confirmed that the latest Mac OS X Leopard release, from 10.5.3, has support for the device. But I don’t want to only use it to geotag my photos, I also want to use the device to track my bike trips – http://www.mapmyride.com/.
Sony also only list support for various Sony cameraes, but the device syncs well with non-Sony cameras as GPS location data and jpeg metadata (EXIF 2.1) are standards. I used an old Konica Minolta camera for my first tests, and will later test it with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX35 camera. The unit weights 55 g and can store your geographic position four times a minute, which makes about 15 days worth of trackpoints on the 31 MB of internal memory. Battery life should be about 10 hours on AA batteries. GPS-CS1 make it a great deal for those of us who only want a photo tagger, don’t need a full-size GPS unit, and don’t want to buy a GPS camera.
The GPS-CS1 device lets you attach it to a backback or belt loop, so that you carry around while you shoot. It records your GPS location and this information can later be synchronized with your digital images to provide a map of where your photos were taken, by using date and time information stored in the image headers. For this reason it’s important to make sure the clock on the digital camera is correctly set. No setting is needed on the GPS device because the time is also transmitted on the satellite signal.
I use Flickr for photo sharing. There’s a setting there that you have to manually change before you upload EXIF-geotagged photos; once you do this, it’ll map all newly-uploaded photos automagically! I have long wanted to arrange my pictures geographically on Flickr. This can of course be done manually, but that is taking a lot of time. With a GPS you can import the logged data in to Flickr, but first you must enable “Import EXIF location data” in your account settings (see screenshot above).
I chose HoudahGeo as my preferred application for merging photos with geo dato. The application has a lot of potential, and I find it to be the best one available on the Mac platform. And the price? Yes, great software rarely comes for free. The application costs 25 euros, and is worth every cent! I have a few words about their support service as well. I fired of a question to their published e-mail address last Sunday morning, and got it answered a few moments later. Unexpected and very pleasant! I have a few suggestions for improvements of the application that I have included in this blog entry.
The first button lets users import photos directly from iPhoto. The window that appears should be familiar for all users used to using the iLife applications. A great feature is that drag and drop from iPhoto is supported too. Even the name and comments fields from iPhoto are imported too! Photos can also be imported by clicking on the second button in toolbar.
HoudahGeo synchronizes the images on your digital camera with the latitude, longitude and time readings from several GPS devices (Garmin, Magellan and Wintec) over Bluetooth, but it can also read the data from files from devices mounted with USB (as the GPS-CS1 device). The Sony device stores the geo data in .log files, so it’s just to choose the correct file:
Adding the geo data to the photos are done in a matter of one or two seconds, and you are then ready to go the three last buttons in the toolbar. The first button writes the saves the geo data to the pictures, the second exports the EXIF data and the pictures to Google Earth or Google Maps, and the third one uploads the photos with geo data to Flickr.
HoudahGeo supports upload of selected photos to Flickr. You can also set it to only upload photos that have been geocoded. Just as the official Flickr Uploadr, you can define the maximum image size (resolution) for the photos when uploaded in Flickr. The last option “Include machine tags” shows the geo data as metadata in Flickr.
Before it starts uploading the photos to Flickr, you are asked to authorize HoudahGeo as a trusted Flickr application (the app can later be deleted in your Flickr settings.
I would like to see a better integration with Flickr. I truely miss not being able to add the photos that I am about to upload to an existing set or create a new one. It would also be great to add other tags than machine tags.
PS! You don’t need to purchase a GPS device to enjoy the wonders of HoudahGeo, the application can also be used to manually add geocoding to photos by using Google Earth or Google Maps.
The Citybikes in Oslo
1A few days ago I was contacted by Loreal Monroe, the Deputy Director of Forum For Urban Design, a non-profit organization based in New York. She asked me if the forum could use one of my pictures published on Flickr. They are going to holding a charette on the feasibility of implementing a bike share program in New York City. Of course they could use one of my pictures, but we also agreed that I would be taking several more pictures for them.
I simply loved the idea, as it is in the spirit of one of the websites I am the webmaster for. GECHS is a core project of the International Human Dimensions Programme. We situate environmental changes within the larger socioeconomic and political contexts that cause them, and which shape the capacity of communities to cope with and respond to change. Our research focuses on the way diverse social processes such as globalization, poverty, disease, and conflict, combine with global environmental change to affect human security.
The photographs will be exhibited on the walls of the Storefront for Art and Architecture on large illustrations of their respective cities. The cities are Barcelona, Stockholm, Oslo, Pamplona, Lyon and Paris. My pictures are of the ClearChannel Adshel‘s Citybikes project in Oslo, which is also running in Bergen, Trondheim and Drammen, in addition to several cities abroad.
In Oslo, Drammen and Bergen – you need to have an electronic subscription card. This card can be purchased for a very low price and is valid for one year at a time (70 NOK). In Trondheim, a subscription card is not necessary in order to make use of the bikes, they can be removed from the bikestands by using a coin. The goal of the Citybikes projects is to reduce pollution of the inner city areas by offering an environment friendly alternative to traditional transport. One of ClearChannel Adshel’s goals is letting the Citybikes help to improve the availability of public transport by “overlapping” the various transport routes in a flexible way. As an example, many tourists are making use of the bikes, and in Oslo and Bergen, the tourist information and several hotels are offering tourist cards for a deposit.
The Citybikes have 4 gears, an adjustable seat and a practical luggage holder. The bikes should be accessible in the designated bikestands, placed in connection with all central transport points, in according to agreements with the municipalities. The bikestands are electronically designed to alert maintenance personnel when necessary.
Do you want to learn more about the New York Bike-Share Project?
Then please visit Storefront for Art and Architecture, 97 Kenmare Street, New York City, July 7-11, 2007.
As a few last words, think about this:
The average amount of gasoline consumed per inhabitant per year is 31 liters in Sub-Saharan Africa, 50 liters in Asia, 427 liters in Western Europe, and 1.637 liters in North America.