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Google Map Photos and SuperGeotagged
via geobloggers by revdancatt@gmail.com on May 09, 2008
There’s been a bit of coverage about Google’s new addition to maps.google.com, with VentureBeat probably adding the most opinion about it. Google’s video has it pretty much covered …
… Ok, so just a touch deeper at what I think is going on here.
Google snapped up the rather wonderful Panoramio a while back, a photo site built on the raison d’atra of location. And not knowing the full details I believe that Google/Panarmio have a cycle of someone or something, or a combination of both of those, looking at all the new photos (since the last cycle), and deciding which ones will make it into the next Photo layer on Google Earth. Or rather I suspect they decide which ones won’t, but the principle is the same.
The new crop of photos, and removal of old ones that have either gone from the site, or someone has asked to be removed, are then converted and stored in a Layer for Google Earth. So when a version of Google Earth is released, it comes with the latest “Data Pack” of Panoramio photos. There’s no actual ‘live’ searching of the Panoramio site that I’m aware of.
Now, at the same time as making the layer, Google can also prepare the data for Google Maps, let’s take a quick peek at San Francisco …
… here’s a similar view from SuperGeotagged (using flickr photos, more on that later. I also think they could slightly smaller images at this zoom level) …
This is done by loading in an additional set of transparent tiles over the top of the map, this is tangently covered in my previous blog post Paul Smith’s thoughts about maps, it’s worth scrolling down to read his comment at the bottom.
Here’s an example of a transparent tile from both sites …
… Google’s tiles are served from their own servers, and SuperGeotagged supply their own slightly less ridged looking tiles.
SuperGeotagged: You can read more about the SuperGeotagged over here: SuperGeotagged - Every Geotagged Photo. Which as it happens isn’t every geotagged photo, just everyone with the “geotagged” tag, around 1.5 million of them. I have no idea how long it took Sean to render the tiles, but he needed to grab the thumbnail for each photo, so I suspect a long time.
Google on the other hand could possible render the tiles on the fly, if you compare the two images below, the first from Google and the second from SuperGeotagged, it looks like Googles coverage is quite sparse, which is isn’t. Actually they seem to have just deciding to render only a certain number (sorted somehow) of photos at a time, for if they are using the same photos in maps.google.com as they are in Google Earth, they should have over 3x as many photos represented here than you see on the SuperGeotagged map.
The difference you see below is fairly dramatic …
… so either Googles tiles are being rendered on the fly (and cached) and only the ‘top’ 200 or so photos are being used to keep thing quick. Or they are all pre-baked, in which case I don’t understand why they don’t go for a more even distribution at the global level. There’s seems to be no reason for google to render the tiles on the fly as no dynamic search is actually being done.
Which brings us to actually how useful is it to display as many photos as possible on a map?
Well with pre-baked tiles, it’s not actually possible to perform searches for images and view them in this style. I can’t just say to either Google or SuperGeotagged, show me photos tagged ‘beach’. SuperGeotagged would have to ask flickr for the photos via API searches and then render the tiles. Google have it slightly easier in that they can have the data on hand, so throwing enough machines at it makes it possible, maybe, sorta.
Each of these sites could pick a theme if they wanted too, “Windmills around the world” and then Google could show them on Global Windmill Day, or something, but then that’s editorial controls, which for the record is just fine with me.
So what are we left with? Well the photos are good for showing us the distribution of where people take photographs (generally where people sell cameras as it turns out), and I believe SuperGeotagged does a better and more artistic job of this. It’s really showing you, “yeah, there’s piles of photos here”.
Google on the other hand, leaves me slightly cold. When you first “Explore the area”, you basically get 8 photos and 2 videos placed live onto the map (the same way that Panoramio do -video), which is great, but at the same time I can’t actually search for stuff, like “coffee”. Or rather as soon as I do, I lose the photos. It being Google, I feel that I aught to be able to search for photos (and the resulting photos to be from the internet as a whole, not just Panoramio, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish).
Then when I click to view “More photos” I get thrown into pre-baked tiles mode, which is great for getting a feel for a place (which you can do with straight image search), which looks like it’s trying to be useful (in a way that SuperGeotagged doesn’t pretend to be), but isn’t so much. I can’t actually click on all those photos of the Golden Gate Bridge because they are all on-top of each other.
Anyway, this is starting to sound like a rant, so I’ll end with this.
I know the people at Google are smart, so I expect something a little smarter. Just because you can throw thousands of photos on a map, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, no matter how pretty it looks. Unless you’re offering it up as a pretty-thing (like SuperGeotagged), not a search-thing (like what Google is known for).
(and I’m not saying this because SuperGeotagged are using Flickr Photos, in theory with Panoramio’s API they could use ‘Googles’ images, and I’d still prefer the way SuperGeotagged have done it than Google, because of how it’s presented).
Oh and yes I know, its easy to lay out criticism like this, we (flickr) are far from perfect ourselves, with our own collection of problems, but I’m actually in a position to do something about these here. With Google I can just poke, prod and nag, they can always poke, prod and nag back at me next week at Where 2.0 :)
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