A few weeks ago I commented about Googles new photo overlays, in which they pre-bake Panoramio photos into tiles. I said I was unsure of why they didn’t have a more even distribution of photos at the global level.
Well it seems that (totally co-incidently I’m sure) a more even spread has now happened. Although I have no idea when this change came into effect, I see no mention on any of the Google/Panaramio blogs. Anyway, this is what the global level used to look like …
Old:
… compared to how it looks now …
New:
The new is definitely a marked improvement. There’s a lovely even distribution of photos, and even a little artistic flair in having a select few larger photos. It certainly feels like the larger photos are picked out as being more photogenic too, although I have no idea if this is actual true, and if it is, if it’s editorial scoring or some other method to devise photogenicness :)
The spread happens across all levels. Again a comparison between the North edge of San Francisco from a few weeks ago to now…
Old:
New:
Again, the difference is obvious. And while it’s definitely better, I guess I maybe hard to please, but it’s still not quite right (imho) when you’re zoomed in at this level. A mix between the two in this case would be great.
While the new has the photos less obscured by each other, the older version does a better job of showing where the overall distribution of photos is. You can see the clusters around the Northeast edge and over the two bridges. The algorithmic spread introduced into the newer tiles has artificially effected the distribution of the number of photos taken in different areas.
As an example it looks as though there’s just as many photos taken in the water just off the North edge of San Francisco as on the land just under the North edge. While on the older tiles you can see this isn’t quite true.
There’s probably a happy medium somewhere between the two. Like the strength of the clustering effect being proportional to the zoom level. The more zoomed in, the more photos cluster, highlighting dense photographic areas. The more zoomed out, then less clustered and more evenly spread, giving a good visual sampler of large areas of the world.
Anyway, good to see that improvements take place, and I’m still interested to see what “themed” pre-baked tiles would look like, such as “night” or “sunset” or “celebration” or what have you.
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I’d love to have my pictures show up in google maps but I use flickr, not panoramio. I imagine a lot of folks feel the same way. How hard do you think it would be to set up a mirroring service, that updated a panoramio account with new photos posted to a flickr account? Looks like Panoramio’s API is minimal, just one call for doing a geosearch, so there would be screen scraping involved.
I don’t think it’d be that hard. But it’s probably easier with a desktop application that grabs your latest geotagged flickr photos and uploads them to Panoramio. That’s take the strain off a mirroring server.
And it’d make it handy to have backups *anyway*. I haven’t had a look at Panoramio’s APIs and don’t really have the time anyway, having about a zillion other things I need to work on. But I’d be interested to see something.
There’s not much to look at, just one REST call which is not useful for this app. http://www.panoramio.com/api/
There’s also an RSS feed for each photostream.