Flickr announces Machine Tags, (via Mikel) which is formal support within Flickr’s database and API for what are also known as TripleTags, namespace:predicate=value.

Example:

geotagged
geo:lat=43.245
geo:lon=-83.211


The idea was to add some specific meaning to a set of data (photo) in a way that was accessible to the user through the user interface. Savvy types would add keywords to the EXIF Metadata, but this is tedious, and this metadata is often stripped out when using some image conversion utilities for resizing/cropping/etc. Therefore, soon after the popularization of folksonomy, users found a way to also add ’semantic’ data.

However, this usage, while working, was not inherently supported. People used it as a way to find all their ‘geotagged’ photos, or photos of forests, and so on. But parsing them and dealing with them was sometimes a pain from the developer perspective, and it also made a mess of your tag clouds or tag listings as you had all these one-time-use tags for the specific lat/lon point.

Now that Flickr internally supports machine tags in a good way, developers can really start using this as a way to attach arbitrary metadata to any data item (photo, etc.) Dan Catt gives a good discussion on what it all means and how it can be used.

I wonder if a Microformats-like impromptu standards body will pop-up to help formalize the namespaces and predicates. Why ‘geotagged’ and not ‘geolocated’, ‘geo’, ‘geomarked’, etc? While free-form naming is nice – so very extensible, being able to use a common vocabulary would also be nice.

Perhaps just accomodating current standards and applying them to the machine tags would be good without requiring any additional work. I’m thinking like hcard:fn=andrewturner, hcard:url=http://highearthorbit.com, hcard:phone=555-1212, etc.

You the developer

So, the end result to the developer is to check out the additional parameters to the Flickr search method in the API. There is now a machine_tags optional parameter that allows you to search by namespace, predicate, or value and use boolean constructions for these parameters.

Dan Catt even references Spimes as an excellent example of why machine tags can really empower devices, especially sensored/automated ones. And now that Flickr has no limits on uploads, you can create frequent update-rate sensored images.

Tags: flickr, semantic, geo, tags, photography,

In addition, your photos are only geotagged in Flickr – and therefore not easily usable outside the service. The better way to geotag your photos is to actually write the Geo data to the EXIF of the photo. Then the metadata is carried around with the photo itself (until you pass it through some mean, metadata chomping machine like Photoshop).

The way I geotag my photos is to first get the coordinates of photos:

1. Carry around a GPS and store the tracks as GPX files – then you can mesh the GPS with the photos using WWMX (Windows), GPSPhotoLinker (Mac), or various scripts in Linux (fend for yourself, but check the geowankers mail archive)
2. Mark GPS Waypoints – or lookup addresses of locations and use MultiMap to get the latitude/longitude of these points
3. Guess

After I’ve either meshed up my coordinates, or have a list of locations, I fire up iView Media Pro, or iPhoto, and use my Applescript scripts in addition to ExifTool to actually write the GPS metadata. Because photo editing applications (like the aforementioned Photoshop) are usually very mean and don’t restore geo-metadata on edit and save, I suggest you edit all your photos first, and apply the geo Exif as the last step before uploading.

Now that you’re going to upload your photos, you first need to make sure Flickr uses these geotags for actual mapping. Enable Flickr to read your Geo EXIF tags. If you already have uploaded photos with geo-coordinates in the Exif data, Flickr will add these to the map (after a short wait – queueing and all).

You can my Flickr Photo Map, and you should go take some photographs! (especially for Pentax Day)

YahooFlickr finally released their built-in mapping tools.

Here’s how their mapping works:

1. Go to “Organize” your photos, and then select the “Map” tag
2. Answer the Privacy question – location privacy will become more of an issue with the rise of social location tracking, geotagging, etc.
3. Flickr sees if you have any existing geotagged photos and places them – it appears to just use photos that have been tagged with geotagged and not read the location information if it is embedded in the EXiF. Hopefully that is something that will change
4. Drag photos from the bottom well onto the map. Make sure to place the round button below the photo thumbnail. You can then add more photos to this stack of photos at a location. Also, place photos by the subject matter, not where you took the photo from. If I’m looking for the Eiffel tower photos, I don’t want to see it placed down the Champs d’Elysee
5. Photos now have a “Map” link below them on the photos page. You can also explore photos near where your photos were taken – so very social

Overall it’s a very good user experience. It’s nice now that mapping is baked-right-into Flickr, which means quicker adoption rate, and easier to get going with your mapping (rather than being relegated to various mapping utilities and scripts)

A couple of things I hope Flickr adds very soon:

1. GeoRSS output in the feeds
2. Add Microformats:geo to the photo descriptions
3. Markup the location description of each photo in Microformats:adr format.
4. Parse the Geo Exif tags in photos

I’m using iView Media Pro, and always wondered about the Subject and Scene options in the Metadata. iVMP has the best metadata editing I’ve found in any DAM. There just seem to be perhaps too many metadata options.

Turns out there is this whole history to photography. In fact, there are 28 groups of terms called NewsCodes that are used to help fully annotate media. These NewsCodes might specify that a media archive is of “cartoon”, “criminal”, “nightclub”, or “derivative securities” and that the location was “underwater”, “aerial”, “rear view”, or “offbeat”. The IPTC NewsCodes offer a complete listing of the currently suggested vocabulary. And they’re ever so thoughtful to offer a Windows program for viewing and saving the NewsML files.

iVMP allows you to easily bring in Vocabularies like the IPTC NewsCodes, except in simple text format. They’re easy to manipulate, and I’ve formatted the Scene and Subject Code files that you can drop into (remove the underscores, or merge the files into your existing vocabulary files):

~/Library/Application Support/iView/Plug-ins/Vocabulary/Default/

Maybe I’ll put together a quick viewer or formatting utility if there’s interest.

Unfortunately, it’s not available until Fall 2006.

I recently put together another project, the Forest Images Registry Project (or F.I.R.), for GreenerMagazine in conjunction with Dirty Greek and SustainaBlog. This project is a response to the recent US Government decision to approve the sale of US National Forest lands to raise money for rural buildings. See the recent Environmental News Network press release.

The FIR is to gather photographs and stories of visitors to these wonderful forests before they’re gone and to hopefully raise public awareness of the situation and contact their government representative with the citizen’s viewpoints.
If you would like to contribute images, check out the Forest Images Blog and join the Flickr! Group and triple-tag your images.

fir:forest=nameofforest
and/or
geo:lat=latitude
geo:lon=longitude
and/or
fir:state=statename

As a colophon, the Forest Images Registry Project site is written in Ruby on Rails (edge) and uses the Cartographer and rflickr plugins. The site is undergoing very active development, so stay tuned for some upcoming features.

But I digress.

Behold, there was scripting

… and it was good.

I had written an Applescript to set the latitude & longitude (and other location info) to selected photos in iPhoto. iPhoto was often beligerent and required a restart of the iPhoto (and possible database recreation) to read the location information (which was viewable in the “info” panel).

iView puts the location info as a user-editable set of fields in the EXIF data fields. Users can set city, region, country, etc. But for whatever reason, they are unable to change the latitude & longitude.

I paired down my iPhoto script to just handle latitude & longitude and handle getting the file name from iView. The tough part was how to get from the iView example selected_images to a useful POSIX path to feed to exiftool. This code does the trick.

set selectedID to selected_images(1)
if selectedID = {} then
	display dialog "No photos selected"
	return
end if

repeat with this_photo in selectedID
	set photo_path to path of this_photo
	set the image_file to the POSIX path of photo_path

Installing & Using the script

Download the script here and expand it in your ~/Library/Application Support/iView/Plug-ins/Scripts folder and then reload iView. You will also need exiftool, as it is the real magic behind the smoke & mirrors.

To use the script, select whatever photos you want to apply the same location information to. Then go to the “Scripts” icon in the menu bar, and choose the “Set Lat/Lon” script. Enter the latitude, longitude, and altitude in decimal format, pressing “OK” after each field. Wait a little while, and then a dialog will tell you how many photos were processed.

Back in iView, you should see the latitude & longitude information in the right side-bar. You can also turn on lat/lon view in the thumbnail view by pressing Command-J and selecting “Latitude” “Longitude” “Altitude”. You may need to press Command-B to rebuild the thumbnail to have the info show up the first time (or on updates).

When exporting images (say to flickr!), your geo-annotated data will stay intact and can then be mapped (or mapped).

This script is released under the Creative Commons.

-- This applescript will set the exif keywords, name,
--  and comments of all selected iPhoto images using
--  the information current in iPhoto.
--
-- Author: Andrew Turner (http://highearthorbit.com)
--
property copyright : ¬
		"Copyright Andrew Turner, 2005. All Rights Reserved."
property URL : "http://highearthorbit.com"
property exifToolOriginal : "_original"

-- True retains copyright, False means Public Domain
property Copyrighted : "True"

tell application "iPhoto"
	activate
	try
		copy (my selected_images()) to these_images
		if these_images is false or (the count of these_images) ¬
			is 0 then ¬
			error "Please select a single image."

		repeat with i from 1 to the count of these_images
			set the keywordslist to ""
			set this_photo to item i of these_images
			tell this_photo
				set the image_file to the image path
				set the image_title to the title
				set the image_filename to the image filename
				set the image_comment to the comment
				set the assigned_keywords to the name of keywords
			end tell
			repeat with j from 1 to the count of assigned_keywords
				set the keywordslist to keywordslist & " -keywords+=" ¬
					& item j of assigned_keywords
			end repeat
			set output to do shell script ¬
				"exiftool -title='" & image_title & ¬
				"' " & keywordslist & ¬
				" " & " -comment='" & image_comment & ¬
				"' " & " -Copyright='" & copyright & ¬
				"' " & " -CopyrightNotice='" & copyright & ¬
				"' " & " -Rights='" & copyright & ¬
				"' " & " -Marked='" & Copyrighted & ¬
				"' " & "'" & image_file & "'"
			do shell script "rm '" & image_file & "'" ¬
				& exifToolOriginal
		end repeat

		display dialog "Exif writing complete."
	on error error_message number error_number
		if the error_number is not -128 then
			display dialog error_message buttons {"Cancel"} ¬
				default button 1
		end if
	end try
end tell

on selected_images()
	tell application "iPhoto"
		try
			-- get selection
			set these_items to the selection
			-- check for single album selected
			if the class of item 1 of these_items is album then error
			-- return the list of selected photos
			return these_items
		on error
			return false
		end try
	end tell
end selected_images

You can grab this script and a simpler Copyright only, as well as a Location (latitude/longitude/city,region,country) script here.

However, I recently came across their GoogleMaps integration, smugMaps. It’s very much like geobloggers, except geobloggers seems to have gone off the deep-end on functionality, widgets, and whatnot. They even describe (though with much detail left out), how to mix-up your own geo-tagged smugMug images.

Reading the “about us” page on smugMug makes me think the site should be called “smugInternetBarons”, but I digress. Their self-touted wealth may prevent them from ‘cashing in’ later to some company like Yahoo! (or MSN) and instead just continue as an independent, fun photo-sharing service.

I remember seeing this about a year ago, seeing the price, weighed against my need for such a tool, and moved along. I recently came back to check it out, and as of January 2005, it’s now free! It has a lot of functinality, example scripts, and automator actions. Check it out.

Overall Flickr is great, and I even opted now for the $25/year “pro” membership that gives me 2GB upload/month. This beats the current 250MB that I’m currently allowed total at my current hosting service. And the API allows for full interface to all of my photos, sets, data, etc. that is stored on Flickr.

Also, there are some great tools for working with Flickr. By far the most useful to me is Spier’s FlickrExport, which is a direct export from iPhoto to Flickr. One can build photosets, add tags, resize, and convert from TIFF. However, the last issue is causing me problems. Somewhere from my iPhoto library, through FlickrExport to Flickr, the EXIF data is being lost. Exporting JPG images to Flickr works fine, but I think FlickrExport drops it. Losing the EXIF data is definitely not an option. However, I currently archive all my images in TIFF to avoid artifacts showing up in editing/saving.

So now I need to figure out if I have to save all my images in JPG format, and just be careful; check out FlickrExport code and see if I can modify how it converts from TIFF to JPG for upload, or use another, external uploader tool.

There’s no reason it has to be restricted to the US, but I guess they’re doing a proof of concept first.

However, the ability for someone, from the warm embrace of iPhoto, to post to their blog is highly appealing.

In similar news, I’ll try and document some of the hacks I’ve made to HighEarthOrbit’s Wordpress install for fellow ‘Pressers.

Of course, neither have geolocation information in their headers. Have to see if they’re using geographic info in their EXIF data.

Specifically, I want to accomplish the following things:

• Retain EXIF data for review/learning
• Add geographic location to EXIF data
• Convert to TIFF for preventing JPEG artificacts during editing
• Adjust exposure, levels, sharpness
• Remove unwanted photos
• Export photos to Photoblog/Flickr/Gallery
• Make prints of nice photos for framing, photo album

So far, the tools I’ve found to do this have been pretty good. The biggest suprise was finding out that QuickImageCM as well as Apple’s bundled Graphic Converter both strip the EXIF data when converting from JPEG to TIFF. Adobe Photoshop CS doesn’t seem to do this.

Really, I think it would be nice to put all of the above features in a folder action but that requires having apps that are Applescriptable. Maybe Mac OS X Tiger’s Automator will help in this regard.

So my current worflow is:

1. Adobe Photoshop CS
2. GPSPhotoLinker
3. iPhoto

Any suggestions for smoothing out this flow?

I feel like I’ve neglected my time in the area and not given it a real chance, so I’ll have to start going down this list and checking sites off.

And found out today our Admin Asst., who has lived in the area her whole life, has never been more than 10 miles west of where she grew up/lives.