Another Fun Toy

If you have spent any time at all looking at my Flickr photostream, you may have noticed that many (405 as of now) of my photos have a link in the description that says something like "See where this photo was taken" or "fly to this location". Clicking this link will show you via Google Earth or Google Maps (depending on the link) the location I was standing when I took the picture. The satellite imagery in some parts of the world is amazing. This all works by adding "geotags" to the images, which is a just a nifty way to add the location from a GPS to the Flickr tags so that the various tools out there can read the information and display the map location.

It is sometimes a chore to add the tags, but there are various tools out there that make it very simple. For example, I find aemkei's Flickr geotagging bookmarklet almost scary in its simplicity (assuming the satellite imagery for the area in question is good).

This morning I even wrote a shell script that will automatically add the geotags to the JPEG files I upload to flickr, as long as I had written GPS data to the RAW file that the JPEG came from. To be honest, the shell script I refer to is actually quite simple now. It started out being quite complex, but as I pored over the man pages of exiftool, and absorbed the significance of the options (the many excellent examples help!), I realized that 98.39857% of the functionality I need is already built into exiftool! (Exiftool is definitely the coolest EXIF viewer & editor I have found. It does everything I have ever thought of, and more!)

Anyway, that is an extremely long intro to the cool new toy I discovered. I have always wanted a dynamic tool to display these geotagged photo locations together on a map, and, even better, to see geotagged photos other than my own as well. I finally found one worth talking about! The tool is still in development, so as of now it will show only the last 50 photos. In order to see more now, you have to zoom into specific areas of the map. Assuming your browser window is the same size as mine, here are a couple examples to try:
Everything around where I call home.
Eastern Germany, parts of Poland & the Czech Republic (Note: watch this space!)
Southern France, Italy & Switzerland
Belgium, Northern France, Southern England
My brother's geotagged photos

Isn't that cool?