The first trip I rigorously photoblogged was my tour of China in 2007. Back then, as now, Flickr offered a rather good deal on storage and had some helpful online tools. For reasons I do not understand, perhaps relating to the increasing size of photos or mismanagement by Yahoo, uploading to Flickr has gotten steadily harder over the years. Back in 2013, I was regularly stymied when trying to upload photos from my trip to attend Guy’s funeral. The Uploadr tool, since deprecated, would inexplicably leave out some of those photos and consulting with technical support did me little good. I’ve tried using Flickr’s new website uploading tool and found it to be slow and quirky. It simply failed to register many of my Picasa tagged photos until I’d given it ten to twenty minutes to finish processing the photos. I’m going to try a few third party apps like jUploader and slow updating for now, but at this point I’m largely sticking with Flickr for legacy reasons. If I ever get around to swapping my site to Wordpress I may find a new photo hosting solution as well.
Happily, the geo-tagging delays were playing with a new toy and not a frustrating attempt to reproduce what once was simple. On the left, you can see our first morning in Tokyo mapped out in Google Earth. Our new camera has wifi abilities and could grab geo-tags off another source, but I have not yet linked them up or worked out whether it could get these tags from my phone without draining the battery. Once I’m further along in blogging I will try to figure that out and may pick a dedicated wifi geotagger if need-be. This effort is worth it to me because I take far too many pictures (between my mother’s camera and ours we took some 9,200) and actually sorting through them and tagging them to make them usefully findable in the future is no small project. In essence, the photos regularly serve as my trip notes. Many of the more banal images are there just because of some cross-cultural or geographic detail that I wanted to remember. However, if I at least know where the photos are from, deriving many of the tags should be much easier as should jogging my memory.
The Picasa geo-tagger works with Google Earth, allowing you to do text based searching or visual scanning of the 3D map in order to find where your photo was taken. The interface can be a little rough, you notably you cannot change the size of that tiny little window in the lower right to give you more of a photo to work with. Similarly, while you can control the number of photos being tagged on the Picasa end, you cannot shift-select once you’re in Google Earth. Tagging one or tagging all our your only option. Finally, I had a bit of false hope based on the fact that the size of the focus reticule, seen in the upper left of that picture, stays the same size at variable level of zoom. My initial naive take was that if you tagged from a greater zoom, it may somehow track that, perhaps in an error measure or just by rounding off the latitude and longitude to avoid false precision. That is not the case, so I’ll have to consult my friendly neighborhood esteemed information scientist about geo-tagging best practices.
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