geobloggers

So, yay, Flickr released Video today.

One of the things I really like about this is that they get geotagged in just the same way, you drag them onto the map, or you use external tools that call the Flickr API to set location …

flickr.photos.geo.setLocation

… just as you did before. The thing it doesn’t do is read location data from EXIF headers, because, ummm, video doesn’t really have they yet. We’re only just seeing the results from the demand for embedded GPS in cameras (mainly in mobile phones, but whatever), so hey, why not start it for Video too.

And, you get to view videos mixed in on the map just as you do photos (some of my videos in SF) …

… Obviously there’s the question of how you geotag a video that’s travelled over a distance, but for my favorite use for geotagged videos; a simple shot of a location, with the sounds of the environment (birds, trains, passers-by) in the background or someone narrating the view, essentially a photo with a soundtrack, it’s great.

You can of course pull geotagged videos out via the API the same way you do with photos …

flickr.photos.search&bbox=-180,-90,180,90&media=videos&extras=media,geo&user_id=35468159852@N01&api_key=your_api_key

… but with the new media=videos attribute, extras=media,geo will return the media type (photo/video) in the records you get back (the geo part gives you the lat/long), pretty sure the online docs will get updated any time now ;)

So now we have around 45 Million geotagged photos, lets see what we can do with video to build up a resource of API searchable geotagged video, with the ability to do the usual search parameters; tags, bounding boxes, creative commons, etc.