iPhone + Flickr Places = A Visual Notebook
The above photo is simply unacceptably blury to be of use — even to publish publicly on Flickr — but that didn’t stop me from uploading it to Flickr. What I like about having uploaded it to Flickr, and having set its privacy options so only I can see it, is that because I shot it with my iPhone, the image is geotagged and placed on a map. Having then tagged the image “reshoot” in Flickr, I can return to the image, find it on a map and then revisit the location with a better camera.
The GIS component to Flickr has come along nicely. The interface for browsing specifically geotagged images is intuitive, and moving through similarly geotagged images is smooth with images presented at decent sizes. The interface allows one to refine a search where, when starting from a given location, one can add tags to refine the images displayed, with popular tags given as suggestion.
When I started using my EyeFi SD card, I thought I’d be putting a lot more time into GIS systems married to photography. The card worked well, utilizing the same Skyhook Wireless service that positions iPhones using WiFi, and it made getting images off the card easy. This would have been my biggest hurdle to overcome, but even bigger than that was the smallness of my pockets. In the end, I could never bring myself to carry a camera. With the iPhone the issue has now shifted from not having a camera to finding that that camera’s quality is just too poor. This brings us full circle to the fact that I’m now going out and taking notes with this camera, and hoping to return in the near future to re-shoot subjects with a decent setup. We’ll see how successful I am with that.
